Configuring Automatic Email Notifications

The GigaVUE® HC series H Series node provides powerful email notification capabilities, automatically sending emails to specified addresses when any of a wide variety of events take place on the node. Gigamon strongly recommends that you configure this feature so you have immediate visibility of events affecting node health.

You configure automatic email notifications with the email command and its arguments. Start by making sure the CLI is in Configure mode. If the (config) entry appears in the system prompt, you are in Configure mode. If not, use the enable and configure terminal commands sequentially to change to Configure mode. Then, configure email notifications as follows:

Description

Command

First, use the email mailhub command to specify the mail server to use for notification emails. In this example, we are using the email server named smtp.emailsrvr.com. You could also supply an IP address instead of a hostname.

(config) # email mailhub smtp.emailsrvr.com

Next, use the email auth command to supply the email account username and password. In this example, we are using alerts@mycompany.com with a password of mypassword123.

(config) # email auth username alerts@mycompany.com

(config) # email auth password mypassword123

Now that we have set up the account to use, we will turn on email authentication.

(config) # email auth enable

Now that we have configured the settings that let the node send emails, set up who to send them to and when to send them. Use email notify recipient to configure the destinations for event notification emails. You can specify multiple destinations separated by commas with no spaces.

(config) # email notify recipient cday@mycompany.com,mfelton@mycompany.com

The email notify event command lets you configure which events will trigger automatic emails. There are quite a few events available – start by entering email notify event ? to see the list of available events. You can either enable individual events, or, use the all argument to enable them all. We are going to start with the all setting and tune settings as necessary later on.

(config) # email notify event all

It is a good idea to check your settings and make sure emails are sent successfully. You can do that with the email send-test command. If you do not receive the email, check the show log output to make sure the email was sent. Then, reconfigure email settings, if necessary.

(config) # email send-test

You may also want to configure and enable autosupport emails. Autosupport emails are sent directly to Gigamon’s Technical Support department when specified events take place, enabling proactive problem resolution. The GigaVUE® HC series H Series node is preconfigured with the correct destination address – you just need to enable the feature with the following command.

Use show email events to see the list of events for which autosupport emails will be sent. You can change the list with the (no) email autosupport event command.

(config) email autosupport enable

Emails will now be sent automatically to the configured addresses when any of the selected events take place.

There are many other options for fine-tuning automatic email settings, including how to handle “dead letters” (emails that did not reach their recipient), how the email address of the GigaVUE® HC series H Series node should appear, the port for the email server, the reply-to address, and so on. Refer to the GigaVUE-OS CLI Reference Guide for details.