Many of the companies I have worked with in the past have used a combination of monitoring tools. Nagios, What’sUpGold, SolarWinds, Splunk, and others are all capable of alerting you by email when a server goes down, so I have never used the email alert functionality of ISA before. Finding myself in a situation where I needed ISA to send an email alert if a published server were to go down, I started poking around the console (poke, poke) until I found the functionality I was looking for. Having needed more than two minutes to find it, I decided a quick post was called for to help my memory in the future, and to help you if you happen to be reading this post. The only thing we are assuming external to ISA is an SMTP relay host. You could install the SMTP service on practically anything, including the ISA server itself, if you don’t have a relay. So without further ado, here is how to configure email alerts on ISA 2006.
- Log on to the ISA Server Management Console.
- In the Console tree, expand your array (or server if you are running standard) and select the Monitoring node.
- Select the Alerts tab.
- In the Tasks pane, click Configure Alert Definitions.
- Scroll down to the alert you want to generate emails. Highlight it and click Edit. Since I want to know when ISA cannot connect to published server, I selected the “No Connectivity” alert. This will alert whenever the ISA cannot connect to a host configured in the Connectivity Verifiers section, so if you are also checking domain controllers, DNS servers, etc. keep that in mind.
- (optional, but recommended) Go to the Events tab, and select the radio button so that once the alert has triggered once, it will not generate another email until the alert is reset. That way, you won’t get a full inbox if something bad happens.
- On the Actions tab, check the box to Send e-mail, and configure your SMTP server, From:address, and To:address. The To: should be a distribution list, or you should use a Cc: to your backup.
- Click OK, click OK again, then click apply and enter your details in the change tracking dialog.
Easy enough to do, and lets you get onto an outage before someone calls you asking if the Internet is broken. If you were paying attention, you noticed that there were a lot of other alerts that you could configure, and that an alert can also run a program/script/etc.
What other server monitoring solutions do you use? Tell us your favourites by leaving a comment!
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