Increasing the waiting time in mail notifier

Did you checked your escalation policies ?
Never tweaked smoothingwhatever, just wrote my own scripts/notifications.

e.g. certain customer sites are going down, after x minutes a script (asl, shell, perl) is invoked sending the dead sites to your inbox, write it in a db or whatever you wanna do with those.

When you login as admin into sm_gui, go to
Configure --> Global Manager Administration Console --> Escalation Policies
There is where we specify everything what takes actions on certain sites, routers, whatever.

First, create a new entrie in the path and let is last the time you want to waint until an action is triggered. Second pathentrie specifies the scripts which should be invoked.

So we managed to take the following action on a certain customer.
After x minutes, turn blue (change severity), invoke an automatic script (which has to be defined before) which mails the notification (or even parts of it, to a certain mailaddress.

Maybe you can invoke your mailscript the same way.

As soon as a matching notification arrives, it triggers the timer for the appropriate action.When the timer reaches his endpoint, it invokes the action given.
If the site comes back before time is running out, the timer will be resetted. Once again site is down, timer starts again, so you will never execute your script, when the site is down for 5 minutes and you specified 10 minutes zu wait.

rgds Christian

You can use escalations instead of mail-notify, or in conjunction with it. Escalations give you the ability to delay processing of the notification.
For example, you can execute a script after 5 minutes only if the notification is still active. You can send the email from this script, or set a user defined field from the script and have mail-notify notification list to use this field, etc.

Escalations fork a process for every script so performance may be a concern, hopefully the delay would reduce the number of mails you'll have to send.
Are the hundreds of emails you mention due to flapping of a small number of devices etc. ?

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu
RapidInsight: EMC Smarts 2008 Offering of the Year Award Winner
http://www.ifountain.com

Are your systems actually down? If not you may want to check your polling thresholds and intervals under polling and thresholds of your IP-AM-PM domain. We have our timeout for connectivity polling set to 700 milliseconds. You may want to have yours higher if your network is slow. Also look at your polling intervals. This may solve the issue of all your emails, although you still need to look at your escalation policies for that. Tim