Enabling and Viewing Notifications

Oracle automatically notifies you by email to let you know about maintenance and environmental lifecycle activities, including the dates for the next scheduled maintenance. You can expect email notifications for the following:

• 1 month before the start of a maintenance event
• 1 week before the start of a maintenance event
• Extension of a maintenance window
• Rescheduling of a maintenance event
• Cancellation of a maintenance event
• Expiration of an environment (all subscriptions expired). Oracle sends an initial email and a 15 day reminder email.
• Suspension of an environment
• Resumption of an environment

You can also view past notifications for your tenancy at any time in the Console.

Fusion Applications environments that have been converted to or provisioned on the new Oracle Cloud Console experience leverage the OCI Announcements service to send email notifications. The Announcements service alerts customers to operational events that impact service status or their environments, such as maintenance activities. You can subscribe to announcements to receive them by email, SMS, or any other subscription protocol supported through integration with the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Notifications service. The announcements are also visible on the Oracle Cloud Console.

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:

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.

To ensure you're aware of events that impact your Fusion Applications environments, the following announcements subscriptions and notifications are automatically created and configured when a Fusion Applications environment is provisioned:

• Environment lifecycle event topic: <Environment_System_Name>_Fusion_Application_Topic
• Announcement subscription: <Environment_System_Name>_Fusion Application_Announcement_Subscription

The email provided for the Fusion Applications administrator during environment creation is subscribed by default to this announcement subscription. Any admins added to the environment after provisioning must subscribe to this topic if they want to receive the announcements specific to this Fusion environment. Users with the required permissions can change user subscriptions and change or delete the announcement subscription and notification topic, if they want to.

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

• Planned maintenance subscription: Fusion_Planned_Maintenance_Converted_Announcement_Subscription
• General service announcement subscription: Fusion_Service_Announcements_Converted_Announcement_Subscription

You can create more announcement subscriptions as needed to receive notifications.

The table that follows summarizes the announcements that subscribed users receive for the subscriptions that are automatically created:

The default administrator of the tenancy and the Fusion Applications administrator automatically receive e-mail notifications and can view notification announcements in the Console.

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 maintenance notifications. For more information about setting up groups and policies for Fusion Applications, see Managing Oracle Cloud Users with Specific Job Functions.

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

To view announcements in the Console:

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

   The Overview page is displayed.

2. Select Announcements to display all announcements for your tenancy.
3. Use the filters to refine the list.

   For example, select the Service filter, then select Oracle Fusion Applications to view only announcements pertaining to your applications.

   Or, select the Announcement type filter, then select Scheduled maintenance to view only scheduled maintenance notifications.

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.

Here's an example of creating an email subscription for Oracle Fusion Applications announcements:

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

   The Overview page is displayed.

2. Select Subscriptions and then select Create announcement subscription.
3. On the Create announcement subscription page, enter a name and 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 a filter group:
   1. Enter a filter group name, for example, "FA-Maintenance-Notifications".
   2. Select Add filter.
   3. For the filter type, select Service.
   4. For the filter value, select Oracle Fusion Applications.
   5. Select Save changes.

   These filter selections include all announcements regarding Fusion Applications. To include only maintenance-related announcements, add another filter:

   1. Select Add filter.
   2. For the filter type, select Announcement type.
   3. For the filter value, select the following options to include all maintenance announcements: , Emergency maintenance, Emergency maintenance completed, Emergency maintenance extended, , Emergency maintenance rescheduled, and Scheduled maintenance.
   4. Select Save changes.
7. Maintenance notification announcements use UTC and English as the default time zone and language. To change this, under Display preferences, select the preferred time zone for announcement time stamps and the preferred language.

   The Language option is available only when you have selected filter values Type=Service and Value=Oracle Fusion Applications.

8. Under Notifications topic, configure a topic in the Notifications service.
   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 description for the topic. Avoid entering confidential information.
   4. For the Subscription protocol, select Email.
   5. Enter the email address of the person to receive the email notifications. To add more recipients, select Add subscription.
9. (Optional) In the Tags region, select Add tag to add 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.

10. 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.

For all environment-related notifications, create a subscription to the <environment_system_name>_Fusion_Application_Topic.

To add more users to a subscription, such as the one you created in the preceding task, you must create a subscription for the user in the notification topic, as follows:

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

   The Overview page is displayed.

2. Select Subscriptions.

   The list of subscriptions is displayed.

3. Select the name of the subscription to add the user to.
4. On the subscription details page, select the notifications topic.
5. On the notification topic details page, select Subscriptions and then Create subscription.
6. On the Create subscription page, enter the following:
   1. Protocol: select Email. For information about the other protocol options, see Creating a Subscription.
   2. Email: enter the email address of the person to receive the email notifications.
7. (Optional) In the Tags region, select Add tag to add 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.

8. 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.

OCI's Fusion Applications service creates the Notifications resources for you during environment provisioning. After provisioning, you can do the following:

• 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.

After Notifications resources are created during environment provisioning, OCI's Fusion Applications service doesn't automatically update or delete these resources. If you no longer want to receive notifications, or if you delete an environment, you must delete the Notifications resources if you no longer want them.

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 might result in duplicate notifications. If you're receiving duplicate notifications for the same environment and want to unsubscribe from the duplicate topics, you can do the following:

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 to the bottom of the email to find the topic name and topic OCID.

2. Note the topic names provided on the notifications that you suspect to be duplicates.
   1. If they're the same, go to Removing Duplicate Subscriptions.
   2. If they're different, then decide which of the topics you want to remain subscribed to, and go to the next step.
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.