IBM - netcool Flood of Warning: W-STO-103-001: Truncating column Detail Msgs. in

Question
Seeing "Warning: W-STO-103-001: Truncating column Detail Msg" in the log?
Cause
Thousands of "mm/dd/yy hh:mm:ss: Warning: W-STO-103-001: Truncating column Detail" in the log file, unable to see real problems in the log file due to details data is too large to fit in the details table column.
Answer
The problem is related to the details columns being inserted by the probe. For example, the details ($*) in the probe rules file may be returning the value larger than the column size.

One way to resolve it is to modify the data before it is sent to the object server. Check the rules file for detail. e.g. grep -i detail mttrapd.rules. You can use substr to truncate individual (offending) tokens to prevent the message, substr (expression, n). For example, $my_token = substr($some_token, 254).

Refer to "Details function" section for complete description in IBM Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus: Probe and Gateway Guide.

Note that details ($*) should be used only when you are debugging or writing/testing rules files. If used the $* for long periods of time, the Object Server tables can become very large and the performance of the Object Server suffer or degrade.

You can also alter (increase) alerts.details table Detail column size from varchar(255) to a larger number using the nco_config GUI, or ALTER TABLE ... ALTER COLUMN ... SET WIDTH nnnn command. But it may result in performance degradation. See Netcool/OMNIbus: Administration Guide for more information.