Spotlight on SQL Server, Alarm Name "Monitored Server - Windows Connection Failure"
For example:
The alarm was valid and occurred on connection from 1:30 AM - 5:00 AM at which time the monitoring was killed. The issue was resolved at 6:30 AM but they had over 1500 emails during that 3.5 hour window
It could be a Windows 2008 R2 WMI memory leak problem. If you look at the alarm log for that host you mayl see lots of connection failure alarms each one followed by a normal. The failure says ' Collection 'File Systems' failed : WMI query 'Win32_Volume' failed : The paging file is too small for this operation to complete.. [0x800705AF]'
So what was happening is that the Diagnostic Server connected but running any WMI query gave an error and caused a disconnect and an alarm. And so on and so on.
The WMI memory leak is discussed in this blog post: http://blogs.technet.com/b/kevinholman/archive/2010/06/09/wmi-leaks-memory-on-server-2008-r2-monitored-agents.aspx
The hot-fix for this issue is here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/981314
