HP IMC: Email Alerting

21 May 2012 by 3 Comments

HP’s Intelligent Management Center supports the use of email or SMS for alarm notification. It’s trivial to add a rule to get it to send you an email when a device goes down. But what about if you also want an email when the device comes back online? There’s no direct way of saying “send me an email when a critical alarm gets recovered,” but it is pretty easy to achieve what you want. The key is understanding that a new alarm, at level Info, gets generated when the original alarm gets recovered. Here’s how to configure it:

Set up your Mail Server

Go to System -> System Configuration -> Mail Server Settings. Give it a mail relay and a From: address. You can also set up authentication if you need it.

Configure Email Notification for Critical Alarms

Go to Alarm -> Alarm Settings -> Alarm Notification. Under Mail Notification, click Add, and add a rule that looks like this:

Click for Larger

Note it’s set for Critical severity alarms only, for all alarms, for all devices, at all times. You can change this to meet your needs.

Configure Email Notification for Recovered Alarms

Now to get an email sent when a device comes back online, add a new rule that looks something like this:

Click for larger

This time we set the “Concerned Alarm Levels” to Info only. Set “Concerned Alarms” to “Selected Alarms” and you’ll get the option to select alarms. Click Select, and you’ll get a pop-up box listing all the alarms. There’s a lot of choices here, and the trick is trying to find the right alarms. In this case, go down to “NMS Resource” and choose “Device Accessible.” After clicking OK, your configuration should look like the screenshot above.

If you had just set it to send you an email for Critical and Info levels, you would have ended up getting spammed with emails every time a Major/Minor/Warning alarm cleared itself. Maybe that’s what you want, personally I’d rather not deal with that sort of email volume. If there’s other alarm recovery emails you’d like to see, you can easily configure those too. To aid in figuring out which alarms you need to allow, you could set up a rule to send you an email for all Info level alarms. That will spam you for a while, but you’ll be able to work out what the alarm’s name is, and where to find it.

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About Lindsay Hill

Lindsay (@northlandboy) is a network management consultant, with experience across networks, servers, applications and security. He is CCIE #36708, RHCE, CISSP and HP MASE. More of his own content is at lkhill.com.

  • Kavesh

    Great Post, thanks Lindsay. Do you perhaps have any info on setting up the SMS Alerts on HP IMC?

    • http://twitter.com/northlandboy Lindsay Hill

      I know IMC supports connecting a GSM modem to a server, to use that to send SMS messages, but I haven’t done it. That’s mainly because hardly anyone deploys to a physical server these days. What I mostly see is people using email to SMS gateways. That’s usually the easiest way, since then you can just set it up as an email – usually the form is something like @emailtosmsgateway.com

  • http://www.myteneo.net Aaron Paxson

    Just now seeing this post. A great modification that, in my mind, should be default. If you don’t have a large enough team to always “recover” the alarm, you may also want to auto clear the alarm also.