Missing Asterisk Symbol in Email Alerts

Applicability

Description

When configuring a detector in Splunk Synthetic Monitoring, the message preview may display the asterisk symbol correctly; however, the received email alert shows the symbol as missing or stripped. This occurs because the email notification engine often interprets the asterisk as a markdown or formatting character rather than a literal string character.

Investigation

To determine if the issue is caused by the notification engine stripping the asterisk, perform the following steps:

1. Navigate to the detector configuration within the Splunk Synthetic Monitoring interface.
2. Review the message body configured in the Alert Message tab.
3. Compare the text displayed in the Message Preview section with the text received in the actual email alert.
4. If the asterisk is visible in the preview but missing in the email, the notification service is sanitizing the input.

Resolution

To ensure the asterisk symbol is rendered correctly in email alerts, modify the text string using one of the following methods:

Method 1: Escaping the character

1. Navigate to the Alert Message tab of the affected detector.
2. Locate the text string containing the asterisk.
3. Modify the string by adding a backslash before each asterisk.

Example: Change: Signal value for ABC To: Signal value for A\*B\*C

If these steps does not work, you might want using the HTML entity * by doing the same steps , but instead using escape and asterisk, replacing it by the HTML entity