Unclear interaction between Alert Policy suppression and Notification Dampening in HPE Nimble Storage

Short answer

An event that is suppressed by an Alert Policy does not increment the Notification Dampening counter.

Likely explanation (inferred)

Alert Policy suppression filters repetitive events for a single resource before they become active alerts, so suppressed events never reach the notification pipeline where dampening counts.

Confirmed facts

Alert Policy suppression is documented as a per‑resource, time‑window filter that reduces repeated alerts for the same resource. Notification Dampening is documented as a per‑alert‑type rate limiter applied to outbound notifications (email, SNMP, syslog, InfoSight). Public administration guides do not state whether the dampening counter is incremented at event creation or at notification dispatch.

Verification steps

1. On a test array or non‑critical resource, configure an Alert Policy suppression window (e.g., 5 minutes) for a specific event and set a low Notification Dampening limit (e.g., 2 per minute) for that alert type.
2. Repeatedly trigger the event on a single resource (e.g., by toggling a threshold) so it fires many times inside the suppression window.
3. During the same interval, record the Alert History entries for that alert type and count the notifications actually received on each channel (email, SNMP trap, syslog).
4. If the delivered‑notification count matches only the unsuppressed occurrences and stays below the dampening limit, suppressed events are excluded from the dampening counter. If the delivered count is capped at the dampening limit despite most events being suppressed, the counter is incremented at event generation.

If the results are ambiguous because your OS version does not log repeat counts, the one detail that changes the recommendation is the exact NimbleOS/Alletra OS version; with that you can open an HPE support case to ask whether the dampening counter increments at event generation or at notification dispatch.