Basis Errors and Solutions

Symptom

You see no alerts at all in the transaction RZ20 although some nodes are red. The alert generation process is at the same time not affected, since file ALALERTS contains actual alert information, and the free space analysis shows enough free slots for new alerts. The problem affects all MTE nodes without exception. MTE nodes are active and not explicitly disabled. No monitoring pause is active.
Other terms

mktime RZ20 alerts timezone daylight saving time
Reason and Prerequisites

The problem was only reported on the recent versions of the AIX platforms. The problem is likely to appear only during the period when the daylight saving time is active (since 29th of March till 25th of October, Central European Time). The cause of the problem is the software error, namely the incorrect usage of the platform specific function mktime().
Solution

The problem affects only presentation of the alerts. Alert generation and autoreactions are not affected by this problem. All alerts get stored properly although not correctly displayed.
Workaround:
1. If possible wait until daylight saving time is over. The problem will disappear without any intervention. No alerts will be lost.
2. If possible change the timezone setting in the operation system from the default timezone, e.g. “Europe/Berlin” or “CET”, which contains the daylight saving feature, to the manually defined timezone like GMT+2 for the European Summer Time, which does not includes automatic daylight saving feature. Do that only if you can afford manual switching to the winter time with possible SAP system restart later on.
3. You can avoid this problem if you manually set daylight saving information, instead of using preconfigured timezone profiles. For example, instead of
TZ=Europe/Berlin
use
TZ=NFT-1DFT,M3.5.0,M10.5.0
Here you use your correct timezone definition, whatever it is, and set the daylight saving settings manually, using the extended AIX syntax for TZ variable. Another example:
TZ=CST6CDT,M3.2.0/2:00:00,M11.1.0/2:00:00
CST6CDT is the time zone you are in;
M3 is the third month;
.2 is the second occurrence of the day in the month;
.0 is Sunday;
/2:00:00 is the time.
More information from IBM:
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=isg3T1000252

Fix:
Update the kernel and CCMS Agents till the CCMS Patch Collection 2009/3 or newer. See the necessary packages and their patch number in the related note.