SMS: How to Manage the Deletion of Aged Status Messages

The purpose of this article is to provide an in-depth look at how aged status messages are handled and how to manage them.

Scheduling the Delete Aged Status Messages maintenance task is exposed within the Systems Management Server (SMS) 2.0 Administrator console. Navigate to: Each day the task is enabled, it can only start during the particular window of time defined in the property page. The defaults for Delete Aged Status Messages are:

• The task is enabled.
• It runs every day.
• It starts between 12:00am and 5:00am.

Also listed under Site Settings within the SMS Administrator console is Status Filter Rules. For each Status Filter Rule, the Actions tab has an option labeled Write to the SMS database. When this option is checked, it configures the Keep messages for: box to a default of 7 days. This means that after 7 days, the messages that this particular rule caused to be written into the database will be deleted the next time that the SMS SQL Monitor runs.

When you run a default site configuration, this creates two of the status filter rules that affect how long status messages are kept in the database. These two rules are:

• Write audit messages to the site database and keep them for 180 days.
• Write all other messages to the site database and keep them for 30 days.

When a status message is written into the StatusMessages table in the site database, the date after which it can be deleted is written into the DeleteTime field in its record.

This is a very critical point because it means that even if the period in which status messages are kept is modified in the status filter rule, this change does not affect any messages already in the database. It only affects new messages that the modified rule causes to be written into the database.

When a status message record is written into the StatusMessages table in the database, records might also be written into the StatusMessageAttributes table or the StatusMessageInsStrs table.

Depending on the actual status messages being written into the database, the StatusMessageInsStrs table might have more or less rows than the StatusMessages table. However, the StatusMessageAttributes table will be much smaller than the StatusMessages table.

When a record is deleted from the StatusMessages table, a trigger will delete related records from the StatusMessageAttributes and StatusMessageInsStrs tables. If unsupported procedures were conducted on the database, there might be orphaned records in the StatusMessageAttributes and StatusMessageInsStrs tables that will not be cleaned out as aged messages are deleted from the StatusMessages table.

When the SMS SQL Monitor service starts, in relationship to managing aged status messages, it checks the site control file for scheduling changes. The service then checks \SMS\bin\i386\Sqlmon.dat for the time it last ran that task. The particular task will run if:

• The task is enabled.
• The task is within the configured start window.
• The task has not yet run in the current window.

If it has already run that task within the current window, it will skip the task until the next window occurs.