Customizing Notifications

Notifications that are sent to Administrators can be customized based on message type and on-call schedule. Message customization is useful for administrators who rely on both e-mail and paging systems as a means for receiving notifications. The message formats for these systems typically vary—messages sent to e-mail can be lengthy and can contain URLs, and messages sent to a pager are brief and limited to a finite number of characters. To support these types of mechanisms, Enterprise Manager allows administrators to associate a long or short message format with each e-mail address. E-mail addresses that are used to send regular e-mails can be associated with the long format; pages can be associated with the short format. The long format contains full details about the event/incident; the short format contains the most critical pieces of information.

Notifications can also be customized based on an administrator's on-call schedule. An administrator who is on-call might want to be contacted by both his pager and work email address during business hours and only by his pager address during off hours. Enterprise Manager offers a flexible notification schedule to support the wide variety of on-call schedules. Using this schedule, an administrator defines his on-call schedule by specifying the email addresses by which they should be contacted when they are on-call. For periods where they are not on-call, or do not wish to receive notifications for incidents, they simply leave that part of the schedule blank. All alerts that are sent to an administrator automatically adhere to his specified schedule.