I saw this yesterday and it was caused by placement of parenthesis around search terms. For ex. index=blah1 source=blah2 ("Term1">=20) ("Term2"="blah3")
Once the parenthesis were removed the search worked properly.
This error message is very confusing and misleading. I have no idea why this would cause the engine to complain about an email action. We hadn't even gotten to the point of trying to create an alert. :-S
As a side note, I do wish that some error messages were more descriptive and offered more guidance on what could be done to remediate the issue. Or perhaps even a link to search for the error term in your default search engine? 🙂
... View more