What is the dbDown alert all about? What can I do with it?
If one of your monitored databases crashes, or is shut down intentionally for maintenance and you have not set an outage, the dbmonitor will detect the outage and send a dbDown alert to the ProTop Portal. The Portal will in turn send out emails and or pages to all addresses configured to receive them. It will do this every hour by default until the database is back online.
The alert looks something like this in your alert feed on the ProTop Portal:
The dbDown alert is produced by the dbmonitor process. Dbmonitor regularly scans the /etc/dblist.cfg file for resources (databases, app servers, etc) that are supposed to be running on this host. When it finds one and sees that the resource is supposed to be monitored (4th column in dblist.cfg is "yes") it attempts to start a pt3agent for it. In the case of a database, it verifies there is a database lock file (.lk) and if not found, sends the above alert to the portal.
Can I shut it off?
Yes. If you change the monitor value (4th column in etc/dblist.cfg) from "yes" to "no" for the database in question then the dbmonitor will no longer send dbDown alerts to the ProTop Portal for that database.
NOTE: This also disables all alerting for that database even when it comes back online. To restore alerting, change monitor from "no" to "yes" in etc/dblist.cfg and save the file. Dbmonitor will see the change and start a pt3agent for it.
Can I adjust it?
Yes. See this article on adjusting the nag frequency of the dbDown alert.