Notification of an outage not received

Last Modified

Fri Dec 15 20:38 GMT 2023

Description

  • Notification not received.
  • Very rarely is this an issue with the product and most of the time it is a configuration issue.
  • This article will cover some basic strategies to consider when setting up Notifications and monitoring for your customer.
  • It is best to work with one of our Onboarding Specialists to ensure that you are on a good path for setting up Notifications and monitoring for your customers.

Environment

  • N-able N-central 6.x +

Solution

Common points of failure:

  1. Service & State - The device is not configured to detect the type of failure that has occurred.
  2. Association - The device is not properly associated with a Notification Trigger.
  3. Delivery - The notification was sent but you did not receive it.

In order to diagnose where your issue may lie, follow these steps:

1. What Service and State?

Observe the services you are monitoring. Collect the Name of the monitoring service and the State it entered (Failed? Warning? Misconfigured?). Observe the time at which the service failed. For some services, you can: Click on the Service > Reports tab > Detailed Status report to identify the exact time.

2. What appliance is monitoring?

It is also important to observe what the Monitoring Device. Click the Service name > Service Details tab > observe the Monitored By: field. This will show you Agent, Probe, or N-able N-central server.

For example, If the outage compromised the monitoring device (e.g. the probe was offline and the probe was monitoring the service), then you may not receive a failure notification. The services will simply go stale once the Time to Stale threshold is met after no data has been submitted. If you are monitoring several servers with the Connectivity Service, monitored by a Probe located at the same location as the Servers. When a power outage occurs, even the Probe is affected and therefore it can not relay the information to the N-able N-central server to trigger the failure.
To avoid this, it is always a good idea to monitor at least one device (such as a firewall or switch) with a device that is not located in the same physical location. Otherwise, install an agent onto the probe device and configure a Notification for the Agent Status service.

3. What is the Association?

This can be verified on the device by clicking All Devices > devicename > Monitoring > Associations > Notification Profiles. You can then check each of the Notifications listed here to see which services are associated to each Profile. So, if the example Notification Profile you wanted to check was "0 Minute Delay (Workstation/Laptop ES and BM)", click Configuration > Monitoring Notifications > 0 Minute Delay (Workstation/Laptop ES and BM) > Triggers > observe the services associated to this Notification Profile/Trigger.

Often the target of a notification will be a Rule, so you will want to ensure the device of issue is actually targeted by the Rule (associations tab for the device). Example: on N-able N-central 10.2, the default 'connectivity failed' notification targets 'network devices', but not 'Storage', so a NAS with Connectivity failed will not trigger an alert, since it is of Device Class "Storage".

4. Who is the recipient?

Now that we have found a notification associated with the device, let's check to see whether or not you are specified as a recipient for this Notification Profile.

  1. From the Customer level where the affected device is located, click Configuration > Monitoring > Notifications
  2. Click on the Notification Profile that you found in the previous Step.
  3. Verify that you are one of the Default Recipients or one of the Selected Recipients
  4. While you are here, also check the Delay. In a previous step we took note of how long the service was consecutively in a Failed State; if the Delay is greater than the time that the service was failed, then the Notification Profile is working as designed.

If necessary, add yourself as a recipient and this should resolve your issue going forward. Otherwise, move on.

5. Was a Notification Sent?

Just because you did not receive the email does not mean it was not sent by N-able N-central . You can see what notifications have been sent by running the Notifications Sent report. It is available from the Customer (green) Level or Site (blue) level, but not the Service Organization or System Level.

If N-able N-central is reporting that a Notification was Sent, be sure to check your SMTP settings under Administration > Mail and Network Settings > SMTP Authentication. You can also use Test Email Delivery, also found under Mail and Network Settings. The next step is to check your Exchange relay server for filtering or spam settings, reverse DNS records or SPF/DKIM configuration.

Final steps before N-able Support engaging support

  • Was a delay set on the Notification Profile? If so, did the service return to Normal status within that time?
  • What is the user's Notification Schedule? Notifications will not be sent to users if the issue occurs outside of the user's schedule, a notification will not be sent.

See also: