Here's a quick workaround, to stop Foxhound from issuing so many Alert #1 - Database unresponsive messages...
When the target database server is heavily overloaded, Foxhound may take longer than
one minute (or whatever the threshold is for Alert #1 - Database unresponsive) to
gather a sample. In that case Foxhound will issue Alert #1 while it's waiting for
the sample data to be returned, and then immediately issue an All Clear
when it does get the data.
This is new behavior for Foxhound. Previously, Alert #1 messages were only issued if
Foxhound failed to gather a successful sample. In this case, however, Foxhound isn't
actually failing to gather samples, it's just taking a long time.
The change was made because it is important for you to know when your server is
hopelessly overloaded as well as when it is completely unavailable. However, the
multiple Alert - ALL CLEAR messages are annoying, and something will probably be done
about that in the future.
The following image shows what "hopelessly overloaded" looks like. The target database
server is using 64% of a four-core CPU, but the server computer is actually running at 100%
CPU... it's also running a multi-threaded client application with 1003 database connections performing 7,400 database
update transactions per second. The client application wants to do more, but everything is maxed out, and
instead of recording a sample every 10 seconds, Foxhound is taking more than two minutes
for each one. To make matters worse, Foxhound is also running on the server computer; in
this case, the first step should be to move Foxhound and the client application to some
other computer(s).