Issues with Alerts in TFS

Every once in a while we get customers who note issues with alerts. In some cases alerts are being duplicated, items don’t show up in the alerts editor, by default you can only see alerts for yourself, etc. This makes managing alerts difficult in some cases. There’s an easy way to identify and remove unwanted alerts.

CAUTION – THIS INVOLVES GOING INTO THE TFS DATABASE – DANGER WILL ROBINSON, DANGER

Okay, having given you that warning, here’s what you want to do:

Look in the database server for the TfsIntegration database. Run the following selects:

select * from tbl_subscription

select * from tbl_security_identity_cache

The first table gives you the list of subscriptions. However, the users aren’t displayed in the table, only the SID’s. Look in the second table for the SIDS. You can delete rows out of the tbl_subscription table without harm which will remove the alert.

Do NOT delete the first four alerts (which are not assigned to a user and don’t have a filter).

TAKE A BACKUP FIRST.

It never hurts