Sending email alerts to administrators

An alert is a notification of a relevant problem on the Tivoli® Storage Manager server and is triggered by a server message. Alerts can be shown in the Operations Center and can be sent from the server to administrators by email.

Before you begin

Before you configure email notification for administrators about alerts, ensure that the following requirements are met:

An SMTP server is required to send and receive alerts by email, and the server that sends the alerts by email must have access to the SMTP server.
Tip: If the Operations Center is installed on a separate computer, that computer does not need access to the SMTP server.
An administrator must have system privilege to configure email notification.

About this task

An email notification is sent only for the first occurrence of an alert. Also, if an alert is generated before you configure email notification, no email notification is sent for that alert.

You can configure email notification in the following ways:

Send notification for individual alerts
Send alert summaries

An alert summary contains information about current alerts. The summary includes the total number of alerts, the total number of active and inactive alerts, the oldest alert, the newest alert, and the most frequently occurring alert.

You can specify a maximum of three administrators to receive alert summaries by email. Alert summaries are sent approximately every hour.

Procedure

To configure email notification for administrators about alerts, complete the following steps on each hub and spoke server from which you want to receive email alerts:

To verify that alert monitoring is turned on, issue the following command:
```
QUERY MONITORSETTINGS
```
If the command output indicates that alert monitoring is turned off, issue the following command. Otherwise, proceed to the next step.
```
SET ALERTMONITOR ON
```
To enable the sending of email notification, issue the following command:
```
SET ALERTEMAIL ON
```
To define the SMTP server that is used to send email notification, issue the following command:
```
SET ALERTEMAILSMTPHOST host_name
```
To specify the port number for the SMTP server, issue the following command:
```
SET ALERTEMAILSMTPPORT port_number
```
The default port number is 25.
To specify the email address of the sender of the alerts, issue the following command:
```
SET ALERTEMAILFROMADDR email_address
```
For each administrator ID that must receive email notification, issue one of the following commands to activate email notification and to specify the email address:
```
REGISTER ADMIN admin_name ALERT=YES EMAILADDRESS=email_address 
```
```
UPDATE ADMIN admin_name ALERT=YES EMAILADDRESS=email_address
```
Choose either, or both, of the following options, and specify the administrator IDs to receive email notification:
- Send notification for individual alerts
  To specify or update the administrator IDs to receive email notification for an individual alert, issue one of the following commands:
```
DEFINE ALERTTRIGGER message_number ADmin=admin_name1,admin_name2
```
```
UPDATE ALERTTRIGGER message_number ADDadmin=admin_name3 DELadmin=admin_name1
```
  Tip: From the Configure Alerts page of the Operations Center, you can select the administrators who will receive email notification.
- Send alert summaries
  To specify or update the administrator IDs to receive alert summaries by email, issue the following command:
```
SET ALERTSUMMARYTOADMINS admin_name1,admin_name2,admin_name3
```
If you want to receive alert summaries but do not want to receive notification about individual alerts, complete the following steps:
1. Suspend notification about individual alerts, as described in Suspending email alerts temporarily.
2. Ensure that the respective administrator ID is listed in the following command:
```
SET ALERTSUMMARYTOADMINS admin_name1,admin_name2,admin_name3
```

Sending email alerts to multiple administrators

The following example illustrates the commands that cause any alerts for message ANR1075E to be sent in an email to the administrators myadmin, djadmin, and csadmin:

SET ALERTMONITOR ON
SET ALERTEMAIL ON
SET ALERTEMAILSMTPHOST mymailserver.domain.com
SET ALERTEMAILSMTPPORT 450
SET ALERTEMAILFROMADDR srvadmin@mydomain.com
UPDATE ADMIN myadmin ALERT=YES EMAILADDRESS=myaddr@anycompany.com
UPDATE ADMIN djadmin ALERT=YES EMAILADDRESS=djaddr@anycompany.com
UPDATE ADMIN csadmin ALERT=YES EMAILADDRESS=csaddr@anycompany.com
DEFINE ALERTTRIGGER anr0175e ADMIN=myadmin,djadmin,csadmin