Email and Slack Monitoring

1. Introduction

Email notification is an integral part of Standby Multiplatform. If for any reason Dbvisit Standby has failed to transfer or apply an archive after the set threshold has been reached, an email alert will be sent. If any other error occurs, an email will also be sent.

By default, in Multiplatform the e-mail notifications are disabled. Unlike the previous version, the email notification need not be enabled for each configuration. It just needs to be enabled for one time as Global Email Settings.

From Dbvisit Standby MP 11.3 , Notifications via Office365 is fully supported. The basic Authentication was disabled by Microsoft from Oct 2022 with an exception of SMTP.

Basic Authentication and Exchange Online – September 2021 Update

2. Support for GMAIL

Gmail is supported for email notification, below is the example of settings used for GMAIL notification.

( 1 ) SMTP Host, in this case smtp host is smtp.gmail.com

( 2 ) SMTP Port: This would depend on the encryption type for GMAIL, in this case is 587

( 3 ) Encryption Type has three different options StartTLS ,TLS/SSL or NoEncryption. If option of NoEncryption is selected the username and password fields are not highlighted and hidden and others the username and password has to be entered and based on the encryption type the port also changes.

( 4 ) A self signed certificate can also be used for authentication

( 5 ) From Email where the alerts will be sent from.

( 6 ) Save the option

( 7 ) Click on Add Email to enter the email id to which notifications should be sent to

Multiple Email Id’s can be added by clicking on Add Email.

( 1 ) Run a test to confirm if the Email is received

( 2 ) Edit/Change the email to a different id.

(3 ) Delete the email id from the notification list

 

Running a test ( 1 ) will return an email in this format.

3. Enable Notifications for other configuration

In the above example,the notification was configured for an Oracle Configuration DEV(screenshot below). The configuration can be edited as well and the emails will go a specific email id added to this configuration.

 

The same email settings can be used to configure alerts for a different configuration. Below the example shown is for a SQL Server configuration Adworks. The existing email configuration can be imported and an additional email id can be provided to notify alerts for a specific group or person based on the configuration they are monitoring. The settings can be imported from existing configuration as shown below from DEV.

 

 

Click on import to import the email id recipeints from DEV to the configuration Adworks.

Additional Email Id’s can be added for specific configuration as well.

Adding the notification to configurations can be done based on the existing configurations. For example in screen shot below we can import the email notification configuration from AdventureWorks2014 database either from Adworks or from configuration DEV.

In order to enable additional notification for specific for Oracle configuration (such as failure for archive log apply / transfer) you will need also to modify DDC file and set following variables in addition to steps above:

SEND_MAIL_FLAG = Y SEND_MAIL_FLAG_DR = Y

You can change variables via UI:

Miscellaneous Oracle Functions | 5.1 Edit DDC File

For more detailed Oracle related settings check following page:

Oracle Specific Email Notifications

4. Slack Settings

Slack settings are much easier and simpler as the webhook url needs to be provided for specific channels the notification will be sent to.

Test Message for Slack Notification will appear like below.

Import the slack webhook to other configurations