There are times you might want to disable Alerts and/or Symptoms in Aria Operations, generally you'll clone the Default Policy and make your adjustments in this new Policy, but I recently ran into something I wanted to share. All screenshots in this blog are taken from Aria Operations 8.18.
I cloned my vSphere Solution Default Policy and wanted to disable a few Symptoms on a handful of VMs, but when I went to disable them I noticed they were in a State of Activated Force.
Symptom States are documnted here, Activated Force indicates there is a dependancy, meaning an Alert depends on this Symptom. So, when I went to disable it, I get the following.
So, let's find the Alerts that depend on this Symptom, go to Operations - Configurations - Symptom Definitions and find our Symptom.
There we go, you can see the Alerts using this System and the Policies its enabled. We can either remove the Symptom from those Alerts, or disable those Alerts before disabling our Symptom. I went into each Alert and removed the CD-ROM Connected Symptom.
Now back at the Symptom in the Policy, you'll notice its Deactivated, indicating it's not being used anywhere in that Policy.
Generally, you'll want to disable Alerts (not Symptoms) in Policies, but if you run into the message above, this is why.