Deferring alerts is a way to snooze, or temporarily pause the inclusion of certain objects in the report email.
For example, say you get a backup alert and you don't have time to deal with it right now, or maybe you have already fixed the problem and you don't want to get any more alerts until after the next backup job runs.
You can setup a defer for those servers/DBs so that they won't appear in the report email until your deferment period has lapsed.
Every alert has a deferment mechanism, and while they're all very similar, there may be some minor differences.
Below is a table of the alert mechanisms in place, and their basic capabilities.
In general, the name of the deferment mechanism is the name of the alert followed by 'Defer'.
| Alert Name | Defer Table | Defer SP |
| Backup | Alert.BackupDefer | Setup.BackupDefer |
| CheckDB | Alert.CheckDBDefer | Setup.CheckDBDefer |
| DriveSpace | Alert.DriveSpaceDefer | Setup.DriveSpaceDefer |
| Index | Alert.IndexDefer | Setup.IndexDefer |
| InstanceConfig | Alert.InstanceConfigDefer | Setup.InstanceConfigDefer |
| ServiceStatus | Alert.ServiceStatusDefer | Setup.ServiceStatusDefer |
| OrphanedUsers | Alert.OrphanedUsersDefer | Setup.OrphanedUsersDefer |
| ReplLatency | Alert.ReplLatencyDefer | Setup.ReplLatencyDefer |
* For specifics on each Defer SP, click on the individual links above.
While all defer SPs don't have the same parameters, they all share a core set.
| Parameter Name | Data Type | Definition |
| @DeferDate | DATE | The date that the deferment was added to the defer table. It doesn't matter what the exact time is because it's really only there for your information. It's not used by the system. |
| @DeferEndDate | DATE | This is the date that you want the deferment to end. This is used by the system to determine if an alert item will appear in the email report. It's calculated by comparing this date with the date of the email report execution. |
| @DeferEndTime | TIME(7) | This is the time that you want the deferment to end. This is used by the system to determine if an alert item will appear in the email report. It's calculated by comparing this time with the time of the email report execution. Even though it uses TIME(7), the calculation is only accurate to the minute. |
Viewing Defers in Alerts
You can easily turn defers on and off in all the alerts with the ShowDefer column in the dbo.ReportOptions table.
For more information see Configuring Report Options.
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