Hello-

I have a customer that uses PRTG for email notification about down sensors on the network. They are interested in using the failover email notifications, but they have a question about the scenario where their monitored Exchange server may be down.

  • Email notifications from PRTG go to their internal email addresses. PRTG is also configured to use the Exchange server as the email relay
  • If the Exchange server is down, PRTG cannot send email notifications. Even if PRTG were using the default email relay, the Exchange server would not be able to receive the notifications until the server was back up
  • I configured a gmail address for PRTG to send notifications as a backup, but the notifications would have to go to external addresses for them to be received, if the Exchange server were down

My question is: Is there a way for PRTG to detect that the mail server it's trying to relay through is down, and then send to an -alternate- set of email addresses instead?

ie:

  • PRTG detects that the Exchange server is down, tries to send a notice to the internal email addresses
  • PRTG cannot connect to the SMTP service on the Exchange server, and instead switches to the failover email server AS WELL AS the failover email -addresses- so the notifications are still received

Please let me know if this is possible. Hopefully I explained what we're trying to do sufficiently !

Paul

Article Comments

Dear Paul,

the notification delivery options have a setting to specify two SMTP-Servers for the delivery of Email-Notifications. One default SMTP Server (i.e. the internal Exchange) and a "fallback" SMTP-Server which is used by PRTG in case the first one does not respond. But this will then apply for all notifications, not only a certain one (to the particular gmail-inbox). In this case I would recommend to monitor the internal Exchange Server as a device in PRTG (with Ping-Sensors and roundtrip-sensors), and then use a SMS/Pager-Notification if it's down/not working.

best regards.


Jun, 2011 - Permalink