Creating an e-mail action

You can associate an e-mail action with a rule violation. The e-mail action defines the name, description, e-mail addresses of the sender and recipient, and a user-defined subject and message that are initiated in response to an alert.

To create an e-mail action:

1. In the OpenEdge Management console menu, choose one:

Select Library > New > E-mail Action.

Select Library > Go to Library > Create E-mail Action.

The Create new E-mail Action page appears.

2. In the Name field, enter the name of your action.

You must not use spaces or special characters such as an asterisk (*), ampersand (&), or period in this field.

3. In the Description field, enter a description of the action.

4. Enter the e-mail address of the intended alert recipient in the Send to field. (This is a required field.) Consider the following points when entering this value:

You should explicitly enter e-mail addresses (for example, smith@company.com). However, depending on your mail server implementation, OpenEdge Management might be able to determine the mail server domain name and automatically provide the @company.com portion of the address.

You can also enter names using quotation marks. The quotation marks will display when the recipient receives the e-mail. Also, you can enter a comma-delimited list of recipients. For example: "Some User" <someuser@somedomain.com>, "Some Other User" <Someotheruser@somedomain.com>.

5. Enter the e-mail address of the sender in the Send from field. OpenEdge Management supports either of the following formats to enter a value for the Send from field:

someuser@somedomain.com

When this format is received in the recipient's inbox and appears in the FROM: header text of the message, the entire entry name and e-mail address, as entered in this format, appear.

"Some User" <someuser@somedomain.com>

When the recipient receives an e-mail that is sent using this format, the recipient's inbox displays only "Some User" with quotation marks, as the sender of the e-mail. The address does not appear. Similarly, when you open the message, the FROM: header appears as: From: "Some User." Only when you display a received e-mail will you see both the user name and the domain name as entered using this format.

6. Enter a description of the e-mail's topic in the Subject field.

In the Subject field, the phrase OpenEdge Management Alert automatically appears, followed by the e-mail variable %AdminServerNAME% that identifies the specific AdminServer to which the alert applies. However, you can override any of this information. You can also use any of the e-mail variables described in the following table in the Subject field to clarify the content of the e-mail.

Table 6. Variables for an e-mail action
Variable	Description
%ALERTID%	The ID of the current alert
%ALERTNAME%	The name of the current alert
%ALERTSEVERITY%	The alert severity (Severe, Error, Warning, or Informational)
%HOST%	The host on which OpenEdge Management is running
%CONTAINERNAME%	The name of the container that is used to transport the resource
%RESOURCENAME%	The name of the resource that has caused the alert to generate
%ALERTLASTOCCURRENCE%	The date and time of the previous occurrence of the alert
%ALERTREASON%	A text description of the alert
%ALERTCOUNT%	The number of times that the alert has occurred
%ALERTTRIGVALUE%	The value that has triggered the alert
%HOSTLINK%	The HTTP path of the host name
%RESOURCELINK%	The full path of the resource that has generated the alert causing the e-mail to be sent
%ALERTLINK%	The link to the description of the alert that has caused the e-mail to be sent

Note: The percent symbol (%) is used before and after each variable. If you need to include the percent symbol in the text of a message, you must enter two percent symbols (%%) in the message body.

7. In the Send As field, select either Text (the default option) or HTML as the format option for your message. If you select Text, no additional work to your message is required. However, if you select HTML, you must use proper HTML-formatting techniques to ensure that your message will be readable by the recipient.

8. Choose the priority level of the e-mail from the EMail Priority list: High, Normal, or Low.

9. Use the default message variables that appear in the Message area, or edit these variables with the values that will appear in the specific e-mail action that you create. Refer to the above table for a listing of the variables you can define for an e-mail message.

10. Click Save to save or Cancel to discard the action. When you save the e-mail action, the properties of the new action appear.

You can now edit, copy, delete, or test the e-mail action.