Credit goes to Marcus @mldowling for this excellent article, he definitely knows his stuff!
For those using InControl2, there is a built in email notification services available. You can get alerts from InControl2 on the status of the device that the device itself cannot do such as “Device Offline”.
Before you go setting up email alerts, consider carefully why you want email alerts and how you are going to handle them, when you have multiple organisations and within those multiple groups, it is very easy to find your inbox filling up. Only ever add someone (or a distribution email address such as team@comapny) into email notifications after getting the owner of that email addresses permission.
From experience, if you only have a couple of devices, then getting alerts for everything from those device want bother you too much, and it can be good for your first device while you are find you way with it. Remember to reduce the quantity and tighten up the alert filters, if you are always getting alerts, then you are likely to start ignoring them.
Email notifications are managed from within “Group Settings”, so you will need to setup each group. Currently there are no organisational level settings for email alerts; though if enough people express interest in this as a feature, it may be added in the future (could be handy for network administrators that have organisations with over a dozen groups).
The current email options within InControl2 look like this before being configured.
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Device Offline / Online
This is something that your device can not do; email you an alert if it is completely offline.
The default option here is for immediate notification, though reality if you set it to wait a couple of minutes, you’ll capture the major outages. You can also drop it back to zero if you are attempting to prove a point with unreliable power or loss of internet connection, though this information is capture in InControl2 with the logging, so it is time smarter to just come and look at the information when you need it than fill you email inbox up with alerts.
In this example the First time has been set for four minutes and a group distribution name and a specific person are set to get the notification. After an hour, if the system is still down, then Second trigger happens and all of the group administrators will receive and email (see previous post on setting up access permissions). The Third trigger is set for 2½ days (60 hours) to go the the organisation administrators. Naturally set these as suitable for your requirements.
Using emails like this is useful for alerting groups or individuals that a device is down without having to give access to InControl2.
WAN Down / Up
You only need to use this where you have multiple WAN connections, if you have a single WAN connection on all of the devices in a group, then use the “Device Offline / Online”.
This option is partially useful where you have critical load balancing or are using a cellular mobile connection for backup.
You have four options for the distribution
- An organisation or group admin
- All organisation and group admins
- All group admins
- Other e-mail address
In this example we are using specifically two email recipients. Same sort of logic applies when planning these alerts as mentioned above.
Useful Note: Give your WAN connections clear and meaningful names when you set up your router to help easily identify which WAN the alert pertains to.
PepVPN / SpeedFusion Down / Up
The name says it all, this if for alerts if your Peplink PepVPN / SpeedFusion going down and for when they return.
Again use the logic of the above in setting this up.
IPsec VPN Down / Up
This if for those alerts for if your IPsec VPN is disconnecting and for when the VPN is restored.
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The logic in setting up these alerts have been covered above.
AirProbe Alarms
Now here is a challenging one, unless you know what it is for and why, don’t use it.
Silence Period
This is really useful to setup if you have a selection of devices that everyday are going to create alerts due to the way work is done or maybe the environment (such as a router only runs when the sun is shining on solar panels)…
In this example the fleet of dump trucks should all be power off from 7pm until 6am, We have used the tag that matches all of the devices (you can add tags to each device when you edit the device details) . So in this case we are using the alerts to let us know that Dump Truck 123ABC is operational, and if it has GPS from your MAX router, then you in a position to start tracking the truck, though that is a whole different post and thread.
An finally, remember to save your choices
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I recommend that you regularly review the amount of alerts and talk with the recipients to see if they are happy at the level of emails alerts they are getting. If you are an integrator then this makes for good regular contact with your customers too.
Happy to Help,
Marcus 
