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A very popular
event type is the Send Email event.
Before you can create an event to send an email, you must configure your SMTP
server and return email address. This is done by going into the Edit/E-mail
Setup menu option. Note that your SMTP server must be network accessible from the computer you're running PingPlotter on to be able to send emails, so it's possible in the case of a network
failure that PingPlotter may not be able to email you. PingPlotter will continue
to try to send emails once a minute until it is able to get an email out.
The Send Email event is a bit more complicated to set up than most of the event types, as it is
dependant on your SMTP server, and you don't want to be overwhelmed with emails
when conditions are bad. You do, however, want to know what's going on.
You can fire email
alerts based on the standard PingPlotter notification
types.
For the Send an email event you have the following options:
Send
e-mail to:
This can
be an individual email address, or a list of addresses separated by either a
, or a ; (both work equally well). Please do not set this up to be someone at
your ISP unless they have agreed that they want to see this information. A huge
portion of getting problems solved is playing the game right, and overwhelming
people with automated emails is almost certainly going to work against you.
Email
Subject:
This defaults
to "PingPlotter Auto-Alert!", but can be customized with a variety
of variables / text. The following list of variables applies (below in blue):
$host
The monitored host – i.e.: the target that failed.
$year Current 4 digit year (i.e.: 2003)
$month Current 2 digit month (i.e.: 03)
$day Current 2 digit day (i.e.: 08)
$date Date, 4-2-2 format (i.e.: 2003-03-08) for
March 8th.
$hour 24 hour format, (i.e.: 06)
$minute 2 digit minute (i.e.: 02)
For emails, the $host makes a huge amount of sense
(i.e.: $host is down!), while the time/date options aren't as useful because
the email contains data about this in most cases.
Maximum
email frequency and minutes to wait:
The next
two settings control the frequency at which you'll get emails during alert
conditions.
1. "Maximum e-mail frequency in minutes: " is pretty self-explanatory, you'll only
get alert emails that often.
2. "How many minutes to wait before sending:" specifies how long PingPlotter will wait after its first alert condition to send an email. This option
allows you to wait a few minutes to find out if it was a temporary or more permanent
alert condition. You may not want one immediately because you'll want to wait
a bit for more information to be included. For instance, you may want to wait
5 minutes or so before that first email gets sent off.
Testing
and error messages
Once
you have your email set up, use the Test button to see what the
message will look like (and also to make sure all the settings are working).
Any errors should be displayed here. After sending your test message via the Test button, PingPlotter will give you a popup dialog box (see image) letting you know that the message was indeed sent.
Many of the errors that occur during testing can be attributed to incorrect
email setup, so go there first and validate
your settings. For example, an 11004 or 10060 Winsock error usually happens because of an invalid
SMTP server.
