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Problem notification - Send an Email Alert In the previous exercise, Problem notification - Tray Icon Alert, we configured a Tray Icon Alert so you could easily be notified if there's a problem between your computer and Pizza Hut's ordering system, as well as with the site itself. Let's now take this a step further and configure a Send an email alert, so that PingPlotter can email you (to a cell phone, pager, Blackberry, your workstation or really any other device that can receive email) when the link to quikorder.pizzahut.com experiences high latency.
When you have all of your email information entered, click OK to save your settings, and now we'll setup the alert. For the email alert, we not only want to have PingPlotter send an alert email when the latency is high, but we want to also have an email sent to us when the latency drops below our threshold. This will let us know when the conditions are bad, and then again when they improve. In this case, we're considering 350ms high latency, and anything below that acceptable. Of course an acceptable latency number is very application specific. When you're setting up an alert for an application where the service provider says the application is going to choke above 150ms, you'd setup your alert accordingly - replacing our 350 number with 150.
The events for this alert are where this alert increases in complexity over the Tray Icon Alert we did earlier. As mentioned previously, we want PingPlotter to send an email when the latency is over 350ms, but we also want PingPlotter to send an email when the latency drops below 350ms, or what we're considering acceptable. Two emails = Two notifications = Two events. For the first event (Event 1), pick Send an email from the dropdown box. The Notify: dropdown tells PingPlotter when this event should happen, so in this case we want this first event to fire when the Conditions are met, i.e. when the alert fires. Enter your email address in the Send e-mail to: box (instead of pizza@nessoft.com), fill-in the Email Subject you want on the email and then click the Test button. If PingPlotter was able to communicate with the SMTP server you entered in the E-Mail Setup... dialog, you'll get a pop-up message box telling you that the message was sent. If you don't get this pop-up, but instead get the Socket Error message below, something's wrong with your email settings. Most likely your SMTP server either needs authentication, which would be the same values you use in your email client, or you have the email server name entered incorrectly. Another possibility is that you're SMTP server is not listening on TCP/IP Port 25, though this tends to only be the case if you're on a corporate LAN. If you've checked both the server name, and the values for authentication, and they're all correct, the port number is something else you'll want to investigate. If all else fails, make sure you don't have any firewall settings that would prohibit PingPlotter from talking to your email server.
One thing to keep in mind is that you won't get the Socket Error/Connection timed out error if you entered your email address incorrectly in the alert setup, i.e. the Send e-mail to: box - you'll just never get an email. Make sure that's correct if things aren't working for you. The last thing to check before we move on to the second event, or the event that will tell us when our latency is back down below the threshold, is your email itself (i.e. within Thunderbird, Outlook, Eudora or whatever email client you use for mail). Unless your email server's a turtle, you should get the test message back rather quickly. If you don't, check to make sure the email address you entered is correct.
For our second event, Event 2, we want to set the event type to Send an email like we did for the first event. For the Notify dropdown though, we want to know when the alert conditions end, or when the alert stops firing. Notice that we haven't changed the default values for the Maximum e-mail frequency in minutes, or How many minutes to wait before sending: boxes. The maximum email frequency is self-explanatory - wait X minutes (in this case 10) before you send another one. You may be wondering about the How many minutes to wait before sending: value though. This value tells PingPlotter to wait a minute (or more if you set it higher) and see if this was a temporary situation, or if it's a more permanent problem. You can specify 0 or fractional minutes here if that's appropriate. Using 0 will send the email immediately. Leaving this value at one minute (or bumping it up higher) also allows you to gather more information to be included in the email itself. Your two events should look like the events in the two images above, other than the destination email address of course. One note on the destination email (the Send e-mail to: box) - if you want to send the alert email to more than one email address, you can do so by separating them with either a comma or a semi-colon, i.e. pizza@nessoft.com;food@nessoft.com;pizza@pingplotter.com. Congratulations! You now have a very powerful email alert that you can assign to the final destination, or any hop for that matter, by right-clicking on that hop, selecting the Watch this host (Alerts)... menu item, and then assigning this alert - just like you did with the Tray Icon alert. The cool thing is that now that you have this alert and the Tray Icon alert configured, you can use them whenever you need them. These alerts, as well as the others you'll create now that you know how, are saved in the PingPlotter configuration file Alerts.ini. They are not associated with any particular address until you assign them.
Practice now by changing the settings in this alert. For example, the same $host variable we used in the Problem notification - Tray Icon Alert can be used in the Email Subject: of an email alert. You can include any of the date/time variables also (a full list of the variables can be found in the PingPlotter Tutorial and Product Manual), though the alert email will contain the date/time information in most cases. It's a good idea to make your alerts as generic as possible by using these variables so you can reuse them with a minimal amount of changes...if any. |
Before you can configure the email alert, PingPlotter needs to know how to send email through your mail server. You only have to do this once per PingPlotter install, and PingPlotter will remind you with an error message if you forget. The email settings are entered in 
Just like when we setup our Tray Icon Alert, you'll start out by giving your alert a name that's meaningful to you. In this case we're using "Email Alert". For our 
The most common problem seen by PingPlotter Support personnel when a user is having issues with an alert is that the alert is not assigned to a hop. Remember, if the hop doesn't have brackets around it, that hop does not have an alert assigned.