We’ve been covering a number of features in Dbvisit Standby over the last couple of months, and saw just how necessary and helpful they are in making our day-to-day operations less complex. But for all of these we had to be logged in and access the Central Console.

As DBA’s we know monitoring and notifications are extremely important components to minimize and eliminate possible impact to crucial business operations, because downtime means revenue loss etc. That’s why it makes sense to cover how to configure Email Notification this week.

Email Notification
Email notification is an important part of Dbvisit Standby because we want to know if there is/was an issue when sending or applying archived logs. This is achieved by setting certain thresholds and an email gets sent once these thresholds are reached. You’ll find that email notification is disabled by default as different customers use different email protocols etc. This is evident by the following default setting of the parameters in the DDC file:

SEND_MAIL_FLAG=N
SEND_MAIL_FLAG_DR=N

Dbvisit Standby supports SSL & TLS Email server connectivity. You can refer to the supported versions for each in System Requirements. To enable email notification, certain parameters needs to be set in the Dbvisit Standby DDC configuration file depending on the protocol used.

See the below example for Gmail:

SEND_MAIL_FLAG=Y
SEND_MAIL_FLAG_DR=Y

MAILCFG_AUTH_USER = gmail username
MAILCFG_AUTH_USER_DR = gmail username

MAILCFG_AUTH_PASSWD = gmail password
MAILCFG_AUTH_PASSWD_DR = gmail password

MAILCFG_PORT = 465
MAILCFG_PORT_DR = 465
MAILCFG_PROTOCOL = SSL
MAILCFG_SMTP_SERVER = smtp.gmail.com
MAILCFG_SMTP_SERVER_DR = smtp.gmail.com

There are various Email Configuration Parameters which can be set for notification based on each unique requirement. I’m going to demonstrate how to enable Email Notification through the GUI. Then I’ll talk a bit about Heartbeat Messages, Success mail and receiving an email when a Log Gap Report is run.

Watch how to enable Email Notification through the GUI below:

Configuring email notification is simple and provides very important monitoring and notification functionality to help keep operations running smoothly. Please download a 10-day free software trial of Dbvisit Standby and play with email notification settings. Hope you found this week’s instalment helpful. Take care!