Attaching a Notifier to a Device

You can attach one or more notifiers to any device. For each notifier, you can choose which states trigger a notification to be sent. For example, a particular device might have a notifier send an e-mail when a device goes down, but can have a second notifier that plays sounds when the same device goes down, comes up, or enters an alarm state. You might also send an e-mail to an on-site system administrator during the day, and to a different administrator outside business hours.

To attach a notifier to a device:

  1. Select one or more devices.
  2. From the Monitor menu, choose Notifiers Window. The Notifier Settings window appears, containing the notifiers currently attached to the selected item as shown below.
  3. Select or clear the check boxes for the device states you want to trigger the notifier. A notification is sent when the device's state changes to any of the selected states.

Attach Notifier window

Note: You can create a new notifier from the Notifier Settings window. The "Edit Notifiers..." button is a shortcut to the Notifier List in the Server Settings page.

Using the Delay, Repeat, and Count parameters

For each notifier, you can specify Delay, Repeat, and Count parameters. These parameters can be used to control how quicky and how frequently notifications are sent. For example, to avoid unnecessary pages you might configure a notifier to wait until a device has been down for two minutes before sending the first page. You might also choose to re-send a notifier every 10 minutes forever. Notifications are sent until the count is reached, or the device has been acknowledged.

How Delayed Notifiers work

InterMapper maintains a queue of notifications to be sent. When a DOWN, WARN, ALARM or CRITICAL event happens, InterMapper places a notification in the queue, and sets its "time to be sent" according to the delay. (UP, OK and Trap notifications are never delayed.)

When an UP or OK event occurs, InterMapper first searches the notification queue for the corresponding down, warn, or alarm notification. If it's there, InterMapper removes both the DOWN (or Warn or Alarm) notification and UP (OK) event and won't send either one. If not, then InterMapper sends the UP/OK notification straight away.

Notification Escalation

You can use notifiers to implement a problem escalation system by creating two or more notifiers for a device. The first notifier can fire quickly to alert someone immediately. A second notifier can be delayed for a period of time, perhaps 30 minutes or an hour, before notifying a second person. If the problem remains when the second notifier's delay time is reached, the second notification is sent. As soon as a problem is acknowledged, no further notifications are sent, even if the outage lasts a long time.