Notification subscription ID generating this message: GUID’s. Very dangerous. You go first….

Issue:

Lately I have started getting multiple emails for a specific alert.

They all end something like this “Notification subscription ID generating this message: {5EAC6B2E-CA6B-8E0C-25C2-FD1C08AE7E47}” and I think to myself, would it have been so hard to put the friendly name in the email?

So I start looking for information on this GUID. I find that subscriptions are stored in a special management pack called  Microsoft.SystemCenter.Notifications.Internal, so I find and export this management pack and start having a look. Sure enough near the bopttom I can see friendly names of my subscriptions and the subscribers near the top but strangely a search for the GUID has no hits.  Before I really dig into this further I find another option.

Typically I prefer SQL queries becasue this is what I have done most over the years,

select * from managementpack where mpname=’Microsoft.SystemCenter.Notifications.Internal’

this will find me the management pack and in the column MPXML we find the whole XML of the management pack, but it’s not in a datatype that easily provides for xml queries so again I am off in another direction.  As a side note this appears to be an easy way to get the XML without having to export and unseal. I can’t stress enough I would never alter the XML here but it’s a easy way to get a quick look.

The Solution :

Powershell has been on my list to learn better now for a very long time, that really needs to change because of things like this.

Get-NotificationSubscription -id 5EAC6B2E-CA6B-8E0C-25C2-FD1C08AE7E47

Results

Configuration     : Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.Administration.AlertChangedSubscriptionConfiguration
Name              : Subscription94b48623_87c2_4d90_b55e_b9b242d1b0be
DisplayName       : GE UPS Sungle Phase
Description       :
Actions           : {DefaultSmtpAction}
ToRecipients      : {Distribution List }
CcRecipients      : {}
BccRecipients     : {}
Enabled           : True
Id                : 5eac6b2e-ca6b-8e0c-25c2-fd1c08ae7e47
ManagementGroup   : A01
ManagementGroupId : 1d07457d-e935-7145-628e-22efb9d7fe5e

Now we have the friendly name of the subscriptions.

You can also use powershell to enable, disable or delete subscriptions as well but I didn’t look into that too much.

Now that I know what subscriptions are sending the alerts I can start working on removing the duplicates.