ELM’s powerful notification engine allows not only a number of different notification types, but also a great deal of flexibility in when notifications can be utilized. In this tech tip article we’ll take a look at a few samples of different Notification Method schedules as well as an example of using thresholds within the Notification Method to help escalate an issue as necessary. Let’s get started!
Email is the most common of all notifications used, but when you are out of the office or done for the day, what do you do when something urgent comes up? Perhaps you have after hours support staff or someone on call who is responsible for handling these scenarios. Do you have to call them or forward a message that you are receiving from ELM? Not anymore.
If you open the properties of any Notification Method you’ll notice that one of the tabs is called Scheduled Hours. This allows you to control when the Notification Method is active or disabled. To handle the situation described above with after hours support we’ll simply use two Notification Methods for the same Event View, but with different schedules.
To start with we’re going to select our Email Notification, right-click, and copy, then paste.
Now we’ll modify the schedule of our business hours Email notification to only be active between 7am and 5pm. The grid below for time and days of the week can be modified box-by-box by clicking them on and off; row-by-row by clicking on the day of the week, or hour-by-hour by clicking on the number in the column heading. Here you can see we have Monday – Friday, 7am to 5pm (1700) highlighted with navy blue to show that is when this notification is on or active during normal business hours.
It’s always a good idea here to modify the Name and/or Properties of the notification to indicate any special properties – such as the schedule in this case.
Now we’ll open the copy of this email notification we made, change the recipient to our After Hours support guys, and then proceed to modify the schedule again. Here you can see where we’ve highlighted basically the opposite of our normal business hours for the after hours support notification schedule which will also include weekends.
Now with both of these Email Notifications assigned to the same Event View, any events that trigger notifications during normal business hours will go to the “Server Support Group,” and any after hours events will trigger an email to go to the “Server Concierge Team” who handles nights and weekends.
Let’s switch gears now and take a look at a different way to use multiple Notifications using the threshold settings.
We have a ping monitor setup in an environment running on a one minute interval. We also have, by default, the box checked to “Execute configured Actions(s) for every failure,” which is to write an event.
Now in an Event View we already created for Ping Failures, we’ll have two Email notifications assigned again, one to the support team, and a second one to the support supervisor. However we’ll leave the schedules alone on these ones. First we’ll take a look at the support team setup.
On the Threshold tab we’re going to set it to activate if a ping fails 5 times within a 6 minute interval. This setting should allow plenty of time for a typical server reboot so if there’s real a problem, our Support Level 1 team will get an email notification if the server is still not responding after repeated attempts in 6 minutes.
Moving over to the Email Notification for our Support Supervisor we’re going to modify the threshold settings much higher. If this server hasn’t come back on-line within an hour, this threshold setting will kick off an email letting them know that there is a more serious problem, and perhaps that they need to check in with their support team to get an update on the situation, possibly even handle it themselves. The threshold settings for this notification would look something like this.
These higher values will track any on-going ping failure events written and if 58 are found within 1 hour (pinging every minute), then the Support Supervisor will be getting an email to be made aware of the situation so appropriate action can be taken. If the problem was resolved say in 30 minutes, and ping success for this particular server is recorded, then the threshold timer would reset, and the supervisor would not be bothered with notifications for a problem that has already be resolved.
Using thresholds to control notifications for for ping failures with this method is essentially a form of escalation.
We hope that you found this article on Setting Up Multiple Notification Methods and Different Schedules informative and useful and wish you continued success with ELM.