Troubleshooting working with Alert Plus Archives

Troubleshooting Alert Plus Using the Support Page

Overview of the Alert Plus Web Part

To access the Support page, click the Support link from the toolbar of the Alert Plus web part. This page includes options for testing the most common issues for Alert Plus and e-mail server functionality.

Alert Plus Registration

The Alert Plus Registration section tests that the site containing the Alert Plus Web Part is successfully registered so the Alert Plus Standard Timer Jobs know to check for alerts on it. When you access the Support page, a message is displayed telling you if the current site is registered. To check the registration for other sites, enter the absolute or relative path to the site and click Check Registration.

IMPORTANT: If you upgraded Alert Plus from version 2.8 or earlier, the site is re-registered with Alert Plus when you view the Web Part after upgrading (a step in the upgrade instructions). If a site shows as not registered when you check its registration, visit the Alert Plus Web Part page in that site to register it.

Alert Plus Event Handlers

Click View to see the event receivers/handlers used by Alert Plus. Specifically review the Reg. Info column to see the
registered events for each alert. There should not be any events listed in this column unless the Alert Event is A specific column in the list changes or An item in the list is deleted.

Disabling an alert will remove the Event Receiver(s) from the alert list. Enabling an alert will add the Event Receiver(s) to the alert list.

Registration Information

From the Registration Info box, click View to view the XML code for the Web Part registration. This information is helpful to our Support staff if you experience a problem with Alert Plus.

Alert Plus E-mail Support

Click Send Email to test the configured e-mail settings for Alert Plus and display the results in the Test Result box.

Test Result

The Test Result box shows the results from the Alert Plus E-mail Support test. The results are cleared each time the Web Part Page is loaded, or you can click Clear to clear the results.

You will also receive an email if your email server test is successful.

The Last Run Status Column is Blank

Issue

You installed Alert Plus, added the web part to a page, and created a few alerts. The problem is that nobody receives the email messages. When you check Alert Status, you see that the Last Run Status and Last Run Date columns are blank. What’s wrong?

Resolution

This typically occurs when the Alert Plus Timer Jobs haven’t been installed, deployed, and/or activated. To check if they are present on the farm, go to Central Administration and perform the following checks:

Check	Action
Job Definitions	In Central Administration, click Monitoring > Review Job Definitions in the Timer Job section. In the list of definitions, you should see the following Bamboo Alert Plus jobs (with the exception of the Custom Timer Job). Make sure they are deployed to the web application where you configured your alerts.
Alert Schedule	If the standard timer jobs are job definitions on your farm, check to see if the alert you are having trouble with is running under a custom schedule. If so, a custom timer job should have been created for it (see an example above – the job called Bamboo Alert Plus Custom Timer Job – Daily at 05:00:00… is a job created for a custom schedule). Custom Jobs are created by the Bamboo Alert Plus Maintenance Job (before Alert Plus R4.x, they were created by the Bamboo Alert Plus As Soon As Possible Timer Job). Make sure that job has run since you created your new custom-scheduled alert. By default, it runs every 30 minutes, but the schedule may have been altered by a System Administrator.
Farm Solutions	If you do not see the Alert Plus Job Definitions, go to Central Administration > System Settings > Manage Farm Solutions. Check for the following solutions: bamboo.alertplus.mastertimerjob.wsp (no longer there in R4.x, has been merged with bamboo.alertplus.wsp) bamboo.alertplus.wsp bamboo.alertsubscriberwebpart.wsp (no longer there in R4.x, has been merged with bamboo.alertplus.wsp) Make sure they are successfully deployed to the appropriate web application in your farm. If they are there, but not deployed to the web application you need, deploy them to the appropriate web application. Click the solution name link, and on the Solution Properties page, click Deploy Solution. If you do not see the solutions, especially the bamboo.alertplus.mastertimerjob.wsp, re-run the Alert Plus installation.
Web App Feature	If the farm solutions are there and successfully deployed, go to Central Administration > Manage web applications. Click the web application you are using and when the ribbon appears, click Manage Features. A list of features will be displayed. Bamboo Alert Plus Timer Job should be listed if the solution was deployed successfully to the web application. Make sure Bamboo Alert Plus Timer Job is Active. If it’s active, but the timers jobs aren’t there, try deactivating it and then reactivating.

The Value of the Token Does Not Appear in the Email Message

Issue

You configured the Email message sent for your alert to include the values from several different columns in your alert list. When users receive the Email, some of the information they expect to see is missing.

Background

In Alert Plus v4.x and higher, you might see Emails with missing information if your alert is configured to alert on a list view.

A current limitation of Alert Plus is that columns defined as Site Columns are not displayed in the Email message.

Resolution

In Alert Plus version 4.x and higher, when you alert on a list view, the columns included as tokens must be included in the list view. If they are not, modify the list view to make sure those columns are included.

Unfortunately, there is no current resolution for the display of Site Columns in Alert Plus Emai messages.

Performance Considerations

Alert Plus Highlights

Alert Plus Performance Tuning

As a general rule, Alert Plus does not require special performance tuning after installation. Because some organizations may have special performance considerations, the suggestions included in this section are intended to provide users with configuration guidance for specific scenarios that may affect Alert Plus performance. In particular, the section discussing Bamboo List Rollup Web Part tuning provides recommendations to achieve the best performance when rolling up large amounts of data monitored by Alert Plus.

Distributed Architecture

Alert Plus is designed to scale automatically based on your existing SharePoint infrastructure. By using SharePoint timer jobs, SharePoint distributes the alert processing workload across all available Web front-end servers in the SharePoint farm to minimize the impact on a single server.

Since it is possible to configure an alert in any list on any site from the Alert Plus Web Part, it is best to consider consolidating alerts to minimize the number of web parts used. Not only will it be easier for your staff to maintain alerts configured in a single web part per site collection, it will minimize the number of timer job instances as well.

See Overview of the Alert Plus Solution Components for additional information.

SharePoint List and Library Performance Tuning

Similar to the Microsoft advisement that SharePoint lists containing a large set of data should be filtered using list views that result in 2,000 items or fewer, Bamboo Solutions suggests that Alert Plus jobs running on SharePoint lists or libraries should be configured to filter alert items to 2,000 items or fewer for the best Alert Plus performance. To filter alert items, select an appropriate list view or create a CAML query to filter on specific criteria. For more information, read the Event Tab topic and Creating Alerts topic.

List Rollup Performance Tuning

With the List Rollup Web Part, users can combine multiple lists or libraries into a single view and then create a single alert on the resulting rollup, saving time and effort for managing alerts. The following are recommended best practices for reducing the number of alerts users might receive when alerting on rollups that contain a large number of items:

Do not select As Soon As Possible for the alert frequency. Instead, use Every Hour, Every Day, Every Week, or create a custom schedule.

For very large rollups, creating a custom schedule is best because it causes the creation of a custom SharePoint timer job for this specific alert. The standard Alert Plus timer jobs could be used to process multiple alerts, but a custom timer job is responsible for only one alert. See How often should E-mails be Sent for more information.

Use the Combine multiple alerts into summary notification option so only one e-mail with multiple alerts from the same alert job is sent to a user.

An Item Exists Alert Trigger Recommendation

If you are using the alert trigger An item exists, it is recommended that you set the Follow-up Wait Days setting to 1 day or greater so that users do not receive frequent alerts on the same item. This setting tells Alert Plus not to send another e-mail about the same item for the specified number of days. See Which Trigger Type Should You Use for more information.

One email to each recipient or one email to all recipients?

Issue:

You have two alerts that you set up. Both send email messages to a list of email addresses (or a list of Users). In other words, the Recipient tab is configured like shown.

The first alert sends a single email to all three recipients. The other email sends an email to each recipient. The Recipient tab looks exactly the same for both alerts. Why is the number of emails sent different?

Resolution:

summary notification.png The difference between the two alerts is most likely on the Event tab. The alert that sends a separate email message to each recipient is configured to Combine multiple alerts into summary notification. The alert that sends one email to the entire list is not configured this way.

Overview of the new Bamboo product Logging

In April 2017, Bamboo released Bamboo.Logging v3.1.0.0 with the Q1 (2017) Cumulative Update of Bamboo component products.

In response to customer feedback the new logging version uses SharePoint ULS logs by default, instead of the the Bamboo logs. The main benefits of this change are:

Bamboo Log files will not fill the C: drive on WFE servers. Previously, Bamboo products reported errors to proprietary log files located in C:WindowsTempBambooSolutions on each web front end server in the farm as described in Error Log Files.
SharePoint administrators are very familiar with ULS logs and the ULS Log Viewer. When Bamboo products log to ULS, SharePoint administrators have one less set of logs to review.
ULS log files can be more easily managed for size and archived, a feature that was not previously available for Bamboo logs.

Bamboo component products installed or upgraded after April 2017 will have the new Bamboo Logging deployed as part of the Bamboo.Framework.wsp solution, which is common to Bamboo products and globally deployed to the SharePoint farm.

IMPORTANT:
1) If you have multiple Bamboo products installed on your farm, some Bamboo log files may remain in C:/Windows/Temp/BambooSolutions until you upgrade all of the Bamboo products.
2) Bamboo applications (e.g., PM Central, Workflow Conductor, In/Out Schedule Board) will not have the new Bamboo Logging until their respective CU’s are available in Q2 2017.

Please note the following for the new scripts:

The script installs all the WSPs found in the installation folder, in alpha order
The install/upgrade script deploys to all content web apps. If you would prefer to deploy to a single web app, you can modify the script or deploy via Central Administration.
Uses Upgrade instead of Install for existing components.

For additional information about how to use the updated processes:

Installing using the updated install process
Upgrading using the updated process
Uninstalling using the updated process

My Alert Seems to be Stuck in a Running Status

Issue

alert stuck running.png You have several alerts configured on a site. Everything was going OK, but people are now reporting that they aren’t getting their Overdue Task Reminders.

You check the status of your alerts and notice that while others seem be processing successfully, one has a status of Running and seems to have been running for many hours, sometimes even days. This isn’t the usual behavior.

Resolution

When you see something like this, typically something happened to the timer job that processes the alert. SharePoint manages timer jobs on the farm and starts new instances when needed. Although other timer jobs may be OK, this one may have timed out or stopped for some other reason.

Regardless of the reason the job failed, it is important to understand that while the alert has a status of Running, no other timer jobs will pick it up. You need to clear the status.

To do that, follow these steps:

Step	Action
1.	Note the Name of the alert in question. In the example above, its Your Task is Overdue! (ID=1).
2.	Go to View All Site Content on the site and open the Alert+ Configuration List.
3.	Edit the alert in question and change the Status column to Success and click Save. This will ensure that another timer job picks up the alert to process it. IMPORTANT: Don’t change any other values for the alert from this interface. The values stored are based on the selections made when configuring the alert through the Alert Plus Web part. Typically, when the timer job completes, it will update the Last Run Status column. However, if the timer job times out and never finishes, the status is never updated. When the status is Running no other timer jobs will process the alert.
4.	Generally, your alert will run successfully the next time it processes.

Error Log Files

Applies To

Bamboo Products
Windows SharePoint Services v3 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010
SharePoint Foundation 2013 and SharePoint Server 2013—Standard Edition
SharePoint Server 2016

While troubleshooting issues, the Bamboo support team may request a copy of the log files for your Bamboo product(s). Many licensing, functionality and access issue information is captured in the log files found in the BambooSolutions file folder.

This directory is located at C:WindowsTempBambooSolutions

The log files are named in this format: bsc_bamboo_{processID}.log

where {processID} is the ID of the w3wp.exe process which was handling the request at the time of the error

NOTE: These files will be created on any farm server running the Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web Application (on SharePoint 2010 or SharePoint 2013) or the Windows SharePoint Services Web Application (on SharePoint 2007).

To determine which servers on the farm run these services:

SharePoint 2007:

Go to the page Central Administration > Operations > Servers in Farm

SharePoint 2010:

Go to the page Go to the page Central Administration > System Settings > Manage Servers in this Farm

SharePoint 2013:

Go to the page Central Administration > System Settings > Manage Servers in this Farm

There may be many log files. When reporting a problem to support, attach the most recent file(s) to your support ticket. If you know the time at which the error occurred, choose the file with the corresponding date/time.

Refer to Topology and Services in SharePoint Central Administration for a list of servers running this service. Learn more…