In the previous videos we simply setup our
notification email alerts to go to our own
individual contact email address.
Now I'll show you how you can setup other
options and send to things like delivery
endpoints groups and escalation teams.
Keep in mind to make these
changes, you have to have permissions to do so on the AF
Server. Now in
the previous video remember that I
just took my individual contact email address and I
dragged it in to make my email
address the subscription. But how
did notifications know what my
email address is? This
works because when notifications was
installed, it imported
information from Active Directory
and automatically created individual
contacts. And that's why it has my email
here. I can also search other contacts that have
already been automatically created
using the contact search. So for
example I'm going to search for
my colleague and notice how
I can use the wildcard, and from there
I can go ahead and add
her email on the subscriptions.
This methodology works well if you
are going to add some individual
users and their contacts are already created
just like this. But
if we want, we'll explore some other
options that we can leverage and this
contacts information is coming from the contacts that have been
setup on the server. And we can
actually make changes to them if we go down
to the contacts tab. So let's look at the contacts
tab.
Again here is the
individual user account and this is because I'm
running PI System Explorer as that
account. And below it I see the email.
My email that I just boxed,
that counts as a delivery endpoint. And when you hear
the word delivery endpoint, just remember
it's a single entity to which a notification is sent.
So you might be wondering, how is that
different from the individual contact
that's Camille Metzinger? Well let's
say that I had an alternate
email address, we could set that up
and then my individual user would have
two different delivery endpoints.
And if I needed to do that, I could just right click
and do new delivery endpoint. And
again, I can configure another email address
and provide information saying this is an alternate
email address.
I'll set that up as an example.
And once I've set that up, I can go ahead and
check this in and you
can see that now I have two
delivery endpoints, both of which are emails for
my individual
contact. Each delivery endpoint
actually has its own options for
how many times to retry the
notifications and at what interval as
well as what should be the from
email or even if we should use HTML for the format.
So these can be unique to different delivery endpoints.
Now we just
created a delivery endpoint for an
existing individual contact.
But when would we create just a delivery endpoint
that wasn't associated with a particular
individual contact? This really
makes sense if we were instead sending
the notification to a web service
and a reason to do this is if the notification is
actually kicking off some kind of
workflow, maybe to go ahead and order some new
parts or do something like
that. Now in my case I don't have a particular web service
that I want to send notifications to. So I'm
just going to actually go ahead and delete the
delivery endpoint that I just started creating.
Similarly, you can also right click
and create new contacts. This could be useful
if there is somebody who is not part of your
Active Directory who should be a contact and
who should be receiving notifications, say maybe a
partner.
Now there are a couple of other options that we need to
talk about and one of those is groups.
Looking at groups brings up the question,
what about our Active Directory groups? When they get
imported, what do they get imported
as? And they actually get imported as individual
contacts and we can search for them just the same
way that we search for my colleague
Kelsey. So groups are different from our Active Directory
groups. These are groups within
AF and this might make sense if there is
not an existing Active Directory
group that would make sense for a particular
collection of users that we want to
send notifications to. Let's go
ahead and setup a group and I'll show you what that looks
like. So I'll right click and do new
group and in this case let's
say that I am
one of a couple individuals
who is responsible for responding to downtime
maintenance. And we are going to setup a lot of
different notifications for that. So I'll go ahead and setup a
group that will incorporate those individual
contacts. So the first thing is to give it a
name and now that I've
got that filled out, I'm going to go ahead and add
subscribers. I'll click here
to add a subscriber
and I want to setup this group so that I'm a member
and for my delivery endpoint I'm actually going to use
the first email. But you can see that
now both options show up and I'm going
to go ahead and also
add my colleague that we looked for
earlier.
So I'll go ahead and check this
in and now I have a
group that I can leverage and it will
include these two email delivery
endpoints, one for myself and one for Kelsey.
Bringing your attention back
when we were adding a subscriber however, the
creation of groups isn't limited to
just individual contacts.
We could add delivery endpoints or
escalation teams too if we had those
configured. Or we can even add other groups
in addition to everything else. So this
can be very customized. And
the resultant group might include
delivery endpoints that are both email
addresses and web services.
Now with a group, all the subscribers
specified are going to be notified at the
same time. But if we want to
be notified in a specific
order, that's something that we can
actually do with escalation teams. So let me
create a new escalation team and break that down for you.
Again right click, new escalation
team and I'll go ahead and get us started with a new and
description.
OK, let me start actually first by
adding the same subscribers that were in our group
and showing you how this would be different from a
group.
OK, so I've
added the same delivery endpoints
as was in our group but now they have a
specific order. And you can see I can use the
arrows to move them up and down.
With this order, when an Event Frame
gets created, I
will be notified first via this email
address. And after a set
escalation period, if I have not acknowledged
the Event Frame and it's still active,
then Kelsey would receive an email at this
address. So let's set that
escalation period that I just described to be
15 minutes. So I'll configure that
here.
And again the
Event Frame starts and I receive a notification. If
I have not acknowledged it and the Event
Frame is still open, 15 minutes later Kelsey
will receive an email.
Now what happens if after another 15
minutes, Kelsey has not acknowledged
the Event Frame and the Event Frame is still
open? Well that's what is specified
here. We could for example
repeat a set number of times, we could
continue to repeat as long as the Event Frame is
active and neither have acknowledged
it. Or we could end the escalation.
In this case, it's really important that one of us
takes ownership and responds to this. So
as long as it's
active, we are going to repeat the
escalation. And you can customize this however it
makes the best sense for your particular situation. And we can go
ahead and check this
in.
So now that we have created some escalation teams and
groups, when we are configuring the subscriptions to
our notifications, we'll see those
options are now available here.
And we could add
them and for each individual
delivery endpoint, we can
still customize the configuration and whether
or not they should receive a notification at the
start or at the start and end.
With that, we now have a variety of options to
use to customize our notification subscriptions.