Owner field in SCOM Alert Properties

Question

When you open up the Alert Properties of an Active Alert there is an Owner Field that you can populate with a users email address.  How do you assign owners to a system instead of to an alert so that any system that alerts for anything goes to the
owner of that device? Does the owner get an email message or do you need to set up something besides assigning the owner email for that to happen?  What is the purpose of this and where is it reference and used within SCOM? 

Answer 1

Microsoft would probably tell you that "scom monitors services and applications, not servers."  a "windows server" monitored entity contains pretty much every other monitored entity from every other management pack, and in a large
environment one person is probably not responsible for all of them. see my previous example. I may "own" the physical sharepoint server, but I do not care at all about problems with sharepoint. if I assigned myself as 'owner' of the windows
server entity, and got notified of every alert on that box, I could get notified on alerts for sharepoint, group policy, sql, the scom agent, IIS, DNS, AD, exchange, any perspectives or synthetic transactions from that machine, etc. when maybe all
I really care about is the performance/availability of the operating system, memory, CPU, disks, and physical hardware. as a note-mom 2005 monitored "servers" and it was very difficult not to get notified on everything. and it was a beatdown. the
new way is better.
also:  in my opinion, notifications have never really been a priority for the scom team, starting with SCOM 2007. we're expected to have someone watching the Alerts view 24/7 with enough knowledge to route alerts to the correct support people, and/or
have some other process (orchestrator?) routing alerts into some other external ticketing system (service manager?).
creating groups, subscriptions, and scoped views is the equivalent of assigning an owner.