Defining Notification Servers
A notification server is the managed system that performs notification and event collection on behalf of other PATROL Agents.
Why use a Notification Server?
With a notification server, you can centrally manage your event filtering and notification rules. For example, if you need to modify a notification script or change notification rules, you make the change only on the notification servers and not on each agent. For more information about the advantages and disadvantages of locating notification rules on the notification server, see Deciding Where to Place Rules.
Notification servers also provide redundancy when you use a primary and backup notification server.
Using Primary and Backup Notification Servers
To ensure availability, you must assign both a primary and a backup notification for each remote agent. A notification server could be a primary notification server for some remote agents and a backup notification server for other remote agents. Hence, a server that acts as a backup notification server does not need to be idle.
What Happens During Failover?
When a primary notification server fails and a backup notification server takes its place, an alert is generated on the remote agent that sent the event to the notification server. In addition, a message is displayed in the console system output window.
To assure availability in critical environments, the backup notification server must be on a separate machine and network segment.
| Once you have configured a primary and backup notification server, you can use the PATROL Configuration Manager to copy the settings to the other notification servers. If you use this method, make sure that you use the same notification script file name and directory path on all notification servers. |
Using Enterprise Consoles to Send Notifications
If you are using an enterprise console, such as PATROL Enterprise Manager (PEM) or Tivoli, to send e-mail messages or pages, you can configure the notification server to route notification events to the enterprise console. Even though the notification server does not actually perform notification, you must still configure each remote agent to send notification events to a notification server and configure the notification server to route those events to the enterprise console. For a process flow that describes this scenario, see Sending Alerts to an Enterprise Console: Process Flow.
Notification Server Connectivity
When identifying a notification server, make certain that there are no connectivity problems between the notification server and the agents that it serves.
Providing Security
To improve security, create an operating system account on the notification server systems to be used specifically for remote notification. This configuration enables you to avoid using the more commonly used PATROL account. You can configure the notification server so that it is unable to fully login to the notification server system by using the operating system. For example, on Unix, give the notification server login an invalid login shell, such as /bin/false.
Configuring a Notification Server
For more information about configuring a notification server, see Configuring Notification Servers.