Notify DBA of DBMail failiure

[Savil]

OK Chaps get your thinking caps on

We have a program that sends out email via DBMail. Last week the mail servers went down and the only way I found out about it was I happened to be working on a SSIS package that used DBMail. The annoying thing was the NT guys knew about it but did'nt inform us.

On the program in qusetion I can look at the failed messages table and look for consecutive groups of emails that have failed which would indicate the mail server is down. This can be put into a job that runs every hour. Can you think of a way I can inform myself and the other DBAs of the failiure without using NET Send as it is disabled on our system. Obviously I can't send myself an email as the server is down.

 

[Thargy]

This isn't really a DBA task, it's one for your system administrators. They should have alerting and monitoring in place such that the failure of any part of the system causes appropriate messages and notifications to be sent. You should be on the recipients list for all notifications to do with your area of responsibility.

Regards

T

 

[Savil]

Your right Thargy, however if your NT Administrators are'nt "Team Players" so to speak and the failiure was due to them doing a patch without testing it correctly and trying to cover their own backsides, you see my point. I don't care whether they messed up. It's part and parcel of the job but if I know the mail server is down then at least I can take action to resend the emails.

 

[simian336]

Old school... modem and a pager. : )

Simi

 

[Qik3Coder]

Savil,
We had a system that would send a ton of error emails. Every once in a while it would go down, and someone would ask, "Why aren't we getting errors." The machine would then need to be rebooted, and would continue to send error emails.

...My point is:

Have a job that sends you and email every morning at 8AM, if you don't get it, you know something is up.

HTH,
Lodlaiden

If [blue]you have problems[/blue], I want [green]source code[/green] AND [green]error messages[/green], none of this [red]"there was an error crap"[/red]

 

[philhege]

Throw in an alert via NET SEND.

-------++NO CARRIER++-------

 

[SQLScholar]

Agreed with Lodlaiden.

Bolt and braces approach.

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