How to question: Exclude a Group from a Subscription

Question

How do I exclude alerts from a particular Group from being actioned by a general Subscription?

Have a general server failure or server down alert being captured and notified by a Subscription called "Server Down Alerts" built as below:

Have also a Group of Servers using its own individual Subscription with the config below using its own individual Channel:

Issue i have is, whenever a server goes down in my Group, I receive 2 notifications - 1 from its specific Subs/Channel and the other from the general environment Subs/Channel.

How do I exclude the Group from being detected by the general environment Subs while only getting picked up by its own specific Sub/Channel?

Answer 1

Hi Saiyad,

From your screenshots, the duplicate behavior is expected. Your general subscription still matches those alerts globally, and your group-specific subscription matches them as well, so both subscriptions fire for the same alert. SCOM notifications are effectively additive in that sense: if an alert matches multiple subscriptions, each matching subscription can send its own notification. Microsoft also notes that the Scope tab does not support a native “not equal to” or “not a member of” exclusion for groups.

For this scenario, I would not try to solve it only in the subscription criteria. The cleaner approach is:

Keep the special group subscription scoped only to that group.

Create another group for the general subscription, for example: All Windows Computers except GroupX

Then scope the general subscription to that new “everything except GroupX” group instead of trying to exclude GroupX directly in the subscription. Kevin Holman has a good example of this approach using a group population rule with <NotContained>, specifically because notifications/views/overrides do not have a straightforward native exclude model.

One more important point for your exact case: because you are working with Computer Not Reachable / Health Service Heartbeat Failure / Failed to connect to Computer, make sure the relevant scoped group also includes the corresponding Health Service Watcher objects, not just the Windows Computer objects. That is a common requirement for heartbeat/server-down style notifications to scope correctly.

So, in short:

1. You cannot cleanly exclude that server group directly in the subscription Scope tab.
2. Build a second “all except this group” group.
3. Scope the general subscription to that group.
4. Ensure Health Service Watcher membership is covered for heartbeat/down alerts.

Best Regards

Stoyan Chalakov

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