By Roberto Alcocer

For System Center Forum readers that might have missed our first blog posts, this is Jalasoft’s last article about Xian Io’s functionality in a series of eight. Prior posts discussed the monitoring of network device interfaces, port status, a device’s response time, asynchronous monitoring, the monitoring of processes, distributed applications with Xian Io, policy templates and Xian Network Manager Io’s UI integration. On this occasion, we will look into receiving mail notifications associated to network devices being monitored by Xian Network Manager Io.

Ops Mgr 07 provides network administrators with the option to receive e-mail notifications associated to any of the servers, computers and applications being monitored. As soon as the event is generated network administrators will be informed about this problem quickly and thus will be able to take the proper actions to solve this issue

You can also configure Ops Mgr 07 to send you a mail if there is a problem with any of the network devices that you are monitoring with Jalasoft’s Xian Network Manager Io. For example, you will be able to know if an interface of a specific switch was unplugged or if the CPU load of your Linux server is over a normal value without the need of constantly reviewing your Ops Mgr console. Let’s take a look at the steps needed to configure Ops Mgr 07 to achieve this:

Enabling mail notifications:

1. Open the Ops Mgr 2007 console.
2. Go to “Administration”.
3. Click the “setting” node of the administration tree.
4. In the settings panel; double click on the “notifications” element so that the “Global Management Groups Setting - Notification” dialog will be displayed.
5. Click on the “Email” tab and check the “Enable e-mail notification” checkbox.
6. Click on the ‘add’ button.
7. Fill the “SMTP server (FQDN)”, port number and authentication method parameters and click on the ‘OK’ button.
8. Fill the “return address” field with the address of the sender object.
9. Fill the “Return primary after” with the value 0 minutes.
10. Click on the ‘OK’ button.

Creating and configuring an account for mail notifications:

1. Right click on the “Administration > Security >Run as accounts” node and choose the “Create Run as account” option so that the “Create Run as Account” wizard will be displayed.
2. On the introduction step, click on the ‘Next’ button.
3. Select “Actions Account” on the “Run As account type” combo box, insert a valid “display name” and click on the ‘next’ button.
4. On the “account” step, fill all the required fields such as User name, password and domain and then click on the ‘Create’ button.
5. Click on the “Run as Profiles” on the administration tree.
6. Double click on the “notification account” option under the “Run as profiles” pane.
7. Select the “Run as account” tab and click on “New”.
8. Select “Network service Windows account” and Click on the ‘OK’ button.
9. Click OK.
10. Right click on the “Run as profile” node and choose the “Create run as profile” option.
11. Click the ‘next’ button on the introduction step.
12. Fill a proper “display name”.
13. Select “Jalasoft SDK overrides for performance data collection” on the “Select destination management packs” option and then click on the ‘next’ button.
14. On the “Run as account” step, click on “new” and select “Network service Windows account”; finally click on the ‘OK’ button.
15. Click “create”.

Configuring the notification recipients and subscriptions:

1. Right click on the ‘Administration > Notification > recipient’ pane and select the “New notification recipient” option.
2. Click on the “General” tab and provide a recipient user on the “notification recipient display name” field.
3. Go to the “notification devices” tab and click on the ‘add’ button.
4. On “notification channel”, select “E-mail”, provide the mail for the “Deliver address for the selected channel” option and click the ‘next’ button twice.
5. Enter a proper name on the “notification device name” and click on the ‘Finish’ button.
6. Click on the ‘OK’ button on the ‘notification recipient properties’ dialog.
7. Right click on the ‘subscription’ node and choose “New notification subscription”.
8. Provide a subscription name.
9. Click the ‘add’ button and select a recipient.
10. Click ‘next’ up to the “Alert Aging” step and then select “use alert aging as a notification criteria”
11. On the “for longer for than this criteria (in minutes)” parameter, enter 1 and then click on the ‘next’ button.
12. Click on the ‘finish’ button.

After performing these configurations, Ops Mgr 07 will automatically send a notification to your email account as displayed on the images below:

Alert generated on OpsMgr 2007

Received Notification

Should you have any questions/comments about receiving mail notifications & Xian Network Manager Io, please reply to this post, and we’ll make sure to send you an answer as soon as possible. For further information on Xian Io for Ops Mgr 07 please visit our website www.jalasoft.com or visit our booth (#320) at the Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas.