Enabling and Viewing Notifications

Oracle automatically notifies you by email to let you know about any environment lifecycle activities and any events impacting service availability.

You can view up to 3 months of past notifications for your tenancy in the Cloud Console.

Oracle Applications converted to or provisioned on the new Oracle Cloud Console use the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Announcements Service to send email notifications. This service alerts customers to operational events affecting service status. You can subscribe to announcements to receive them by email, SMS, or other supported methods through integration with the OCI Notifications service.

Announcements belong to different categories. An announcement prefix helps you understand, at a glance, the type and relative severity of the information and whether there's anything you can or must do. Announcement types currently include the following, in order of most important to least:

If you want to receive announcements through email or another delivery mechanism, you can manage the tenancy administrator email preferences or configure subscriptions.

Announcement subscriptions direct announcements that match specified filter criteria to your choice of endpoint (email, SMS, and others). Endpoints can be configured using topics in the Notifications service, which can have multiple recipients for a given subscription protocol. A topic is a communication channel for sending messages to its subscriptions.

• If you're a new Oracle customer, the "cloud account administrator" who provisioned the application, or a user with the role "Administrator" in the Cloud Console, you receive all emails and can view notification announcements in the Console by default.
• If you're an existing Oracle customer who has been migrated to the Oracle Cloud Console, all the email contacts (email subscribers) set up in MyServices will continue to receive all emails by default. Any previously added preferences, such as language, time zone, and notification type in MyServices aren't automatically migrated. The cloud account administrator, or someone with the "Administrator" role will need to add these preferences in the Cloud Console.

For customers who have had their environments converted to the Oracle Cloud Console, an announcement subscription is automatically created to preserve their notification preferences in the legacy console:

• General service anouncement subscription: <Service_Name>_Service_Announcements_Converted_Announcement_Subscription

To allow other users in your organization to view notification announcements in the Console, an administrator must add them to a group with the following permission granted in a policy:

Allow group '<identity-domain-name'/'<your-group-name>' to read announcements in tenancy

A user with this permission can navigate to the Announcements page in the Console to view the details of the notifications. For more information about setting up groups and policies for your Applications, see Managing User Access to Applications Environments.

To enable other users in your organization to receive notifications via email or other channels (such as SMS), an administrator must create a subscription and add the user information to the subscription.

To create a subscription, you need the following additional policy permissions:

Allow group '<identity-domain-name'/'<your-group-name>' to manage announcement-subscriptions in tenancy
Allow group '<identity-domain-name'/'<your-group-name>' to manage ons-topics in tenancy

Allow group '<identity-domain-name'/'<your-group-name>' to read announcements in tenancy

1. In the Console, select the Announcements icon () on the top navigation bar.

   The Overview page is displayed.

2. In the navigation pane, select Announcements to display all announcements for your tenancy. Select the applicable compartment, or the root compartment.
3. To refine the list, in the Search and Filter box, select one or more filters and specify the values that you want to use. The filters correspond to the columns shown in the list table.

For more details about working with announcements, see Console Announcements.

This task describes how to create an email subscription. For information about other options, see Console Announcements.

To create an email subscription for Applications announcements:

1. In the Console, select the Announcements icon () on the top navigation bar.

   The Overview page is displayed.

2. In the navigation pane, select Subscriptions and then select Create announcement subscription.
3. Enter a name and optional description for the subscription. Avoid entering confidential information.
4. Accept the default compartment, or select the compartment where you want to create the subscription.
5. Select Selected announcements only.
6. Define one or more filter groups:
   1. Enter a name, for example, Applications-Notifications.
   2. Select Add filter.
   3. For Type, select Service.
   4. Service.
   5. For Value, select your application's name.

   These selections include all announcements regarding your selected application. To include only maintenance-related announcements, add another filter:

   1. Select Add filter.
   2. For Type, select Announcement type.
   3. Add as many selections for Value as needed. For example, select the following values to include all maintenance announcements:
      • Emergency maintenance
      • Emergency maintenance completed
      • Emergency maintenance extended
      • Emergency maintenance rescheduled
      • Scheduled maintenance
7. (Optional) Under Display preferences, select the preferred time zone for announcement time stamps and the preferred language. Maintenance Notification Announcements use UTC and English as the default time zone and language.
8. Define the Notifications topic:
   1. Select Create new topic.
   2. Accept the default compartment, or select the compartment where you want to create the topic.
   3. Enter a name and optional description for the topic. Avoid entering confidential information.
   4. For Subscription protocol, select Email.
   5. For Email address, enter the email address of the person to receive the email notifications. To add multiple people or addresses, select Add subscription.
9. (Optional) In the Tags section, add one or more tags for the subscription.

   If you have permissions to create a resource, then you also have permissions to apply free-form tags to that resource. To apply a defined tag, you must have permissions to use the tag namespace. For more information about tagging, see Resource Tags. If you're not sure whether to apply tags, skip this option or ask an administrator. You can apply tags later.

10. Select Create.

To add more users to a subscription, like the one you created in the previous section, you must create a subscription for the user in the notification topic:

1. In the Console, select the Announcements icon () on the top navigation bar.

   The Overview page is displayed.

2. In the navigation pane, select Subscriptions, and then select the name of the subscription to add the user to.
3. On the subscription details page, select the Notification topic link.
4. On the notification topic details page, select Subscriptions and then select Create subscription.
5. Enter the following information:
   • Protocol: Select Email. For information about the other protocol options, see Creating a Subscription.
   • Email address: Enter the email address of the person to receive the email notifications.
   • Tags: (Optional) Add one or more tags to the subscription.

     If you have permissions to create a resource, then you also have permissions to apply free-form tags to that resource. To apply a defined tag, you must have permissions to use the tag namespace. For more information about tagging, see Resource Tags. If you're not sure whether to apply tags, skip this option or ask an administrator. You can apply tags later.

6. Select Create.

A confirmation email is sent to the email address entered. The recipient must select the Confirm subscription link in the email to activate the subscription.

After provisioning your environment, you can perform the following actions:

• Add or delete subscribers
• Change the announcement subscription filter. See Adding a Filter Group to an Existing Subscription in the Notifications documentation for more information.
• Update and delete the topic. See Managing Topics in the Notifications documentation for more information.

As an administrator, you can subscribe to multiple topic subscriptions. During environment creation (or conversion, if your environments were converted), you can be added to multiple Announcements subscriptions that are created by default. This may result in duplicate notifications. If you're receiving duplicate notifications for the same environment and want to unsubscribe from the duplicate topics, you can perform the following steps:

1. Review the emails associated with the environment and note the following details:
   • The environment name or system name found in the body of the notification.

     To ensure that a notification is a duplicate, it's important to verify the environment that it pertains to, as you might receive notifications for multiple environments (test, development, production) that can appear to be duplicates.

   • The topic name. Scroll down to the bottom of the email, where information similar to the following example text is shown:

     You are receiving notifications as a subscriber to the topic: topic_name 
     
     Topic OCID: (ocid.onstopic.oc1..exampleuniqueID) 

2. Note the topic names provided on the notifications that you suspect to be duplicates. If they're different, then decide which of the topics you want to remain subscribed to, and go to the next step. If they're the same, go to Removing Duplicate Subscriptions.
3. For the topic you want to unsubscribe from, select the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email. The request to unsubscribe is confirmed.