Is it possible to suppress the Health Service Heartbeat Failure alert for 5 mins....I'm getting alert storms that are driving me crazy!! thx, John Bradshaw

I think the solution around that would be to adjust your heartbeat settings. The default HB settings are not optimal in just about every environment I've worked with. A lot of customers change this OoB setting.HTH, Jonathan Almquist - MSFT

Thx Jonathan So it's at 3 atm. (I assume that means a missed heartbeat for 3 consecutive minutes???) What should it be changed to? Are there rough criteria that could be suggested? Should I just experiment at say 5 then 7 etc?? Ta, JB

I can't offer a good value with confidence, since I haven't checked your specific environment. I can say that what I generally see across the board for many customers is the agent HB interval increased to 180 seconds. This would effectively increase the overal HB setting to 9 minutes, which usually allows time for server reboots but good enough to determine whether monitoring is not running for more than X minutes. One thing to keep in mind is HB settings are not the same as SLA. HB settings are intended to alert the company of monitoring failures. To measure what is considered a monitoring failure in a particular environment, we first need to look at the aggregate data coming in from strict thresholds. Luckily, OoB, we have strict thresholds (3 minutes), which allows us to baseline a lot of data in a relatively short period of time (with in week or so). We can query the DW for outage durations to determine what is ACTUALLY an outage and filter those out - these are true outages, and will generally have durations of at least 20-30 minutes. The remaining durations are false positives. Sum these up and calculate the mean outage duration, and this can be your new HB setting. It's not always an exact science...HTH, Jonathan Almquist - MSFT