Request controls in e-mail notifications

#1

Peplink routers include an extremely useful capability to provide notifications of significant events via e-mail. And, of course, e-mail can be used to originate text messages. (This feature is typically found at System | Email Notification | Email Notification Setup.)

My request: I’d like to see some granularity or “controls” in the selection of the events for which notification takes place. In particular, it would be good to be able to select the WANs for which notifications occur. And, we may or may not require notifications if certain PepVPNs fail and recover within a minute or two. An example: We often use T-Mobile M2M SIMs as the means to send e-mail notifications if the primary WANs fail. However, it may not be good to wake up 2-3 network administrators at 03:00 local time when TMO resets its network and disrupts service for about one minute. It would be extremely useful to be able to specify the events for which notifications should take place.

Rick

#2

Hi @Rick-DC,

Some of this may be possible already by using InControl to manage your notifications. I’ve attached a screen shot below to setup a silence period, monitor WAN, PepVPN and IPSec VPN.

You can add more profiles if necessary and use tags on the devices to trigger the necessary alerts.

You could have VPN as a tag and associate that tag with a profile - meaning that only devices with this tag would alert the appropriate email addresses if the VPN drops. Silence periods can be set per profile too.

One thing to note, if a device appears in multiple profiles you will be notified for each alert in each profile, matching the “Devices Notify for” criteria.

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You can also trigger alerts if the device is offline, so perhaps having one WAN disconnected for 15 minutes isn’t a problem, but you would want to be notified if the device is offline for more than 2 minutes - indicating that all WAN’s are down.

I hope this helps,

Steve

#3

Hi Steve. Thanks very much. Yes, I agree: If InControl were in use (it’s generally not) it would be a partial solution. - Rick

#4

Hi,

Email notifications in Incontrol are great but still some improvements needed in my opinion.

It has the same problems then alerting from within devices.

  • It is not possible to separate alerting for Internet line WAN and 4G WAN. We have a lot of devices with 4G configured as failover but this generates a lot of false 4G down alarms when TMO resets their networks. We would like to be alerted only if Internet line is down and not about the transistional 4G failures.

  • Another issue in ICA : when ICA is shutted down for maintenance, it sends Wan down disconnection alarms to all customer when it comes up again. It doesn’t make the difference between a device having been offline and ICA having been offline. IF ICA is offline 3 miniutes it consideres all devices have been offline for 3 minutes.

Kind regards,
Sven