Disable specific Windows services from being monitored

[cbass]

We have numerous Windows VM's in Microsoft Azure. We get alerts and notifications for just about all of them for a Windows service named IaasVmProvider which I believe is used as part of Azure backup. Each one of the alerts is around the same time in the early morning where I believe the backup runs and the service stops afterwards.

But getting to my question, I've found mixed suggestions on how to disable monitoring of certain windows services. I added the specific services that I want to disable monitoring for to "Windows service names for discovery" found under Administration/General/Regular Expressions. Each service was added with a "|" pipe character as a separator so this is correct. But this alert for service "IaasVmProvider" continues to show every day. Am I missing something or is there a better way to disable monitoring for specific services?

I want to say I read somewhere that the alerts will continue for 30 days (not sure why) but there was a way to force the changes to Regular expressions to take right away. I don't recall though where I read that or if I'm confusing it with something else.

Any help is appreciated as always.

Thank you!

[cbass]

I found another solution that suggests modifying Macros under the Template Module Windows services. There's a macro named ${SERVICE.NAME.NOT_MATCHES} where you can add or remove the services you don't want to monitor. But there's a maximum character limit in the value textbox so adding many services won't work. So I created a duplicate macro but named it ${SERVICE.NAME.NOT_MATCHES2} and added my additional services there. I also had to modify the Windows Services discovery rule under this same template. Open this rule and under filters I added a new Macro named {#SERVICE.NAME}, does not match , and added ${SERVICE.NAME.NOT_MATCHES2} to the regular expression.

I'm not sure if this will work yet but will report back after a day or so. But I'm not sure if this is the correct or recommended way to NOT monitor specific Windows services. It appears the solution I discussed in my OP may also work but isn't enabled? I'm not sure how to enable it actually but I think it needs to be added to the filter section of the Discovery rule also. But if anyone has a better or can recommend a solution I would love to hear from you.

Thank you!

[troffasky]

Look at the Interval on the Windows service discovery rule. You can force it to run by ticking the discovery rule on the host and clicking "Check now".

[cbass]

Troffasky, thank you for your reply. I checked the update interval which is set to 1 hour. So it should have run between now and when I posted this issue but again the IaasVmProvider service and problem is reported in Zabbix. So I'm guessing it's either not running or something isn't configured correctly.

But under Windows Services discovery rule, there's a setting for "Keep lost resources period". I'm a bit confused as to what this setting does but I think this setting is what I read about setting to 0 which would delete any old entities. I'm not sure if this would help with the changes I've already made or not. Any thoughts?