Email alerts for specific conditions

(imported topic written by bfa_vkumar)

hi,

just wanted to check if its possible to go ahead and generate email alerts for certain specific conditions. There is a specific request that i am dealing it, where the customer wants an alert to be generated when the RAM in any of his machines undergoes a change.

hence i tried out the option where i wrote in a relevance : size of ram > 524288. But then in case there is a RAM change under this value the alert would not be genrated.

hence wanted to know a more efficient way to target this.

regards,

Vasant.

(imported comment written by Lee Wei)

Hi Vasant,

“Scheduled Activities” in Web Reports is very powerful, but will require some initial setup and understanding.

From your question above, there are a few pieces that you need to work on to make this all come together.

  • Firstly, you need to configure your Web Report server to send out emails. This is under the Email tab. I personally download a small SMTP Server to my local machine, as my other company servers require authentication. One option is to use the Archive to File feature to make sure that the other parts are working, independent of sending an email.

  • The relevance you have above is not correct, as you would need to use the “Session Inspector”. The session inspector runs against the Web Reports server, rather than against an endpoint. Here is any example statement for you to consider. It will return TRUE if there is a computer on the server with more than 512 MB. Note that when we collect the data from the endpoints, we added an “MB” string, which is not good for integer comparison.

“number of bes computers whose (preceding text of first " MB” of value of result from (bes property “RAM”) of it as integer > 512) >= 1"

This is the statement (or variations of it) that you want to put into the “Match Relevance conditions” field in Scheduled Activities.

  • Lastly, what report do you want to send along with the alert? There might be a canned report with the appropriate filter criteria. You might need to create a new Managed Properties to pull just the RAM size from the endpoints, without the “MB” string. This is so that you can do appropriate filtering. For the purpose of showing off the capabilities of custom report within Web Reports, I have created a simple report for you to consider. Create it as a customer report, store it with a new name, and now you have new canned report for emailing.

Computer with RAM greater than 512 MB

<?Relevance trs of (td of name of it & td of value of result from (bes property "RAM") of it) of bes computers whose (preceding text of first " MB" of value of result from (bes property "RAM") of it as integer > 512)?>

Computer Name

RAM Size

Hopefully some of these ideas will get you started in the right direction.

(imported comment written by amitspradhan)

Hi,

The query which Vasant states is exactly what we are looking at our Sites. We had several incidents in the past wherein there had been a theft of RAM and in certain cases the users themselves tried to troubleshoot their performance issues by removing a RAM from their Production systems and adding them to their TEST machines.

The one mentioned by LEE will provide the results for all the systems with RAM > 512…

What the organisation here is expecting from Big Fix is to create an email alert which will mention Details like the hostname, IP Address, Logged in User, Location, Domain…of that system ONLY which has gone this RAM change.

Has anyone tried any such stuff using Big Fix?

(imported comment written by BenKus)

Hey guys,

I set up a few custom Fixlets to perform this check. You can see it at: http://forum.bigfix.com/viewtopic.php?pid=2061#p2061

Ben