Troubleshooting
Troubleshooting SharePoint AlertsA common theme running through the SharePoint newsgroups is the frustration of troubleshooting SharePoint Alerts such as when they stop working altogether or work intermittently. I am trying to organise a comprehensive step-by-step troubleshooting guide that should help solve the most common problems. Its a work in progress so if you know of anything that should be added then let me know by adding a comment. Please Note – this guide is for the Out of the Box (OOTB) alerts in SharePoint, not Pentalogic’s Reminder software (though some parts apply to both). Contact us directly for support for Reminder.  Troubleshooting Flowchart Flowchart in text form The first step is to ensure you understand the difference between Confirmation Emails and Alert Emails. Are you getting any emails?
Which best describes your symptoms?
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What about the SharePoint cache that resides on each front-end server in the farm? I have read about the cache being stuck that can require stopping the timer server, manual deletion of xml files, and reset of the cache.ini file to a value of ‘1′. The cache is located in the Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microrsoft\SharePoint\GUID\ folder structure.
Clearing out the XML files on all servers and resetting the cache.ini to 1 has helped in a couple of cases, but not all cases where alerts were not working across the farm.
Does anyone know the role of the SharePoint cache with alerts and why it might be important to clear it out?
Thanks.
Tom
Awesome little website guys. This is exactly the kind of material my user base can use – easy to understand for end user, just enough tech talk for the IT guys to sort out.
Keep it up!! End user material is rare as hens teeth!!
Good point Tom, thanks – I’ll add this the guide.
Two good references for this I’ve found so far:-
http://blogs.msdn.com/josrod/archive/2007/12/12/clear-the-sharepoint-configuration-cache-for-timer-job-and-psconfig-errors.aspx
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/939308
Can anyone tell me if configurations to enable alerts and email only has to be done once for a site? I ask because I just launched a site to production that three workflows. One of these workflows does NOT send emails on the production site. Neither does that library send out alerts. The other workflows and alerts on this site work fine. Everything workes fine on development.
@Angela – the outgoing email settings are set at the web application level (SharePoint server > web applications > site collections > sites > sub-sites)
It should also be noted that the front end servers AND back end SQL server all need to be able to relay through your mail server. The alerts actually come from the SQL server, whereas the subscription notifications seem to come from the FE box(es).
@Hayden – its not as simple as the alerts always coming from the SQL server, these jobs can be spread across any server in the farm.
Its a point I’ve tried to make with the “Ensure you understand the difference between confirmation emails and alert emails” step at the top of the flowchart but does no harm to repeat the point, thanks!
http://sharepointalert.info/2009/11/troubleshooting-sharepoint-email-primer/
Thanks Ryan, your post is really helpful to me.
Specially diagram was very explanatory and complete to understand how things are working.
Keep up the good work.
Gina
The diagram is what is the best part which explains it all. Thanks a million.
I’m looking for a strategy or method to limit the amount of information contained in an alert. The alerts we see contain all of the information contained in the submitted record – I don’t want that sent via email (unsecure). How do I generate an alert that just provides a link to the list without the record details?
I don’t receive any message when i create the alert from http://www.website.com but if i create it on the localserver http://localserver
it works fine!
thanx for the reply and this overview! rarely you find something so clearly as this…
Thanx
yves
@JFD – If you want to modify the email alert messages then you’ve got 3 options.
1) Make your own alert templates – but the problem with this is they are web application wide so any changes you make will effect all alerts coming from that web app for that particular list type
2) Implement an INotifyAlertHandler - need some fairly serious development resource to make this work
3) Use a 3rd party product such as – blatant plug – our Reminder web part which allows you to easily customise the email message on a per list basis and much more beside!
http://www.pentalogic.net/sharepoint-products/reminder
@Yves – are your alternate access mappings (AAM) setup correctly?
Hi Everybody,
Well we r using Project server 2007 in our PMo and configured personal settings to set the email alerts, but the thing is that we are receiving emails each time when we publish the project to the server.We r geeting an email each time with summay of tasks that 100 % complted and even due tasks saying that these particular tasks are updated.Can any one has faced such problem are any one has that idea to stop generating those emails.Please let me know.Thanks.
Hi All,
Few days back I had an issue with the alerts, wherein my team is not getting alerted whenever there is a change in the lists. I had resolved this issue by deleting one of the aborted timerjob (Upgrade timer job) and later all my team members got a chain of alert mails ( all the mails which were not delivered).
Following is the problem I’m facing now:
As per the alert setting, a mail will sent to the nominees whenever there is a change in the list. Now all my team is getting morethan 1 alert mail for a single change??????
Few people will get 2, few will get 11 and so on.. all the services and timerjobs are working properly.
Can anyone please help me to resolve this issue.
Thanks in advance,
Raghav A J
Hi All,
Finally I found a soln for the problem I faced. What a silly mistake I have done!! he he…I have a set too many alerts for the users for that list. But whenever I navigate through the ‘Action->Alertme->view y existing alert on thi site’, it was not showing anything, but When I lookin the user alerts page, I mean ‘Siteaction->site settings->odify all site setting’ under site adinistration click ‘useralerts’. i’m able to see morethan 1 alerts set multiple times for the list. I selected the unwanted alerts and deleted…..now its working fine!!!!
Thanks,
Raghav A J
[...] Troubleshooting [...]
Raghavendra,
thank a lot for your post. it saved me from sending multiple identical alerts to different users.
Great information – thanks so much for putting this together!
As far as troubleshooting, what would you recommend if a user is receiving multiple emails (5 in this case) for the same immediate alert? We have confirmed in Site Settings->User Alerts that she only has one alert set up. All of the emails are exactly the same and have the same date and time.
Thanks for any guidance.
@Melonie – interesting problem. No answers but loads of questions I am afraid!
* Do you have more than 1 Web Front End (WFE)?
* Whats the pattern, is it always this one user on this one list. Or is it this user on multiple lists or is it other users on this one list – whats the common part?
* Does it happen for new items and edit items?
* What type of list is it – task/issues/custom/document library etc?
* Do you have any event receviers/workflow setup? (if this is the cause you would expect this to occur for every user setting alerts on this list)
* Have you tried simply deleting the alert altogether and then setting it up again – almost like a reboot!
* Do you have more than 1 Web Front End (WFE)? — No, just 1 WFE.
* Whats the pattern, is it always this one user on this one list. Or is it this user on multiple lists or is it other users on this one list – whats the common part? — It’s just for one user on a particular list (calendar). Other users that have configured the same alert on the same list are not having this problem.
* Does it happen for new items and edit items? — Both new and edit items.
* What type of list is it – task/issues/custom/document library etc? — Calendar.
* Do you have any event receviers/workflow setup? (if this is the cause you would expect this to occur for every user setting alerts on this list) — No.
* Have you tried simply deleting the alert altogether and then setting it up again – almost like a reboot! — Actually, that’s what I asked the user to do. I am waiting to hear back from her if this fixed the problem. Other alert \issues\ have been fixed this old-fashioned way and I’m suspecting that will work this time, too. I’ll keep you posted. Thanks!
Deleting the alert and setting it up again did the trick! Such a simple solution but strangely enough, the simple solution is often the one that works. Thanks.
Hi all.
Great blog and some really handy follow-up comments. Unfortunately it doesn’t quite resolve an odd alert problem we have with one of our document libraries. Wondering if anyone can help.
(Please excuse any missing details: I’m writing this from home so I might need to clarify a few bits on Monday).
Environment: WSS 3 (SP1) running on Windows 2003 with SQL Server 2005 standard edition on a separate Windows 2003 server. This was all installed as WSS 3, not upgraded from an earlier version.
Some alerts, including one based on a filtered view, do trigger their emails when the appropriate document changes happen. However another, alert based on a different filtered view, doesn’t work when it should. It is definitely set to run immediately.
The view behind the non-working alert does change and we have even reconfigured it to sort by Modified (desc) to ensure new changes appear on the first page (first 100 results).
I can see all the alerts on the ImmedSubscriptions table and the URLs, site id and library id look correct. When the appropriate document changes occur, the EventCache table picks up new entries for the working views and is then updated when those alerts are sent. But this table doesn’t show an entry for the non-working alert. This suggests to me that the timer job is running properly, but the event isn’t triggering properly in the first place.
Might be worth noting that we had a recent problem with indexed columns on this doc library: filtering on the indexed columns returned no results. So I removed the indexes, which resolved that problem. The view behind the non-working alert is based on one of the columns I had to de-index. Could this be behind it? Although I did create the alert after removing the index.
I know we should be on SP2 by now, but this isn’t an option at the moment: I know that at least one site developer relies on an SP1-specific ‘feature’ to make his workflows work properly.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.