You can specify the content and formatting of issue, change, job and system alert notifications created in the Subscriptions page, and for the defaults specified in the Settings icon –> Notifications –> System Settings page.

Defaults for summary e-mail notifications cannot be edited; you can edit individual summary e-mail notifications. Afterwards, all summary notifications of that specific type reflect your changes for email formatting defaults.

You can change the content and format in the subject, message body and details field for other e-mail notifications. For Syslog notifications, you can change the content and format of the message.

NetMRI uses variables to represent specific data to be substituted at the time of notification. Variables are identified by a dollar sign, followed by the name of the variable. The Notification Variables topic describes all variables for use in notifications. When NetMRI builds a notification, it substitutes data derived from the specific Issue, Change, Job or Alert, for each variable in the Subject line and in the body of the message. If data is missing for a variable, the notification substitutes a blank for the missing data.

Example: The default Issues e-mail subject line contains three Notification Variables:

$SeverityName: $Title seen on $Identifier

For a firewall redundancy failure error, NetMRI rewrites the notification subject line using the variables:

Error: Firewall Redundancy Failure seen on Cisco (172.23.18.66)

Email Formatting Guidelines for Individual Notifications

For e-mail notifications of all types, error messages are generated if NetMRI cannot connect to the SMTP server or deliver the test message.

Note: For SNMP or Syslog notifications, NetMRI will not be able to determine whether delivery was successful, so administrators need to check for delivery status on the remote recipient.

If you edit the email template for a new or existing notification, you will not affect the default template. Changes for a notification remain local to that notification.
For any notification type (Change, Issue, Job or System Alert), click Advanced Settings to locate the message formatting tools.

• Enter the From Address and From Name values that will roughly identify the sender of the notification. The default shows a standard "no reply" email address for sending notifications that are not intended to receive replies.
• Select the Mime Type which will be either HTML (the default) or Text. In both cases, NetMRI uses the notification variables to help format the message block for the email. If electing to use HTML, you can edit the HTML coding information provided in the standard email; or choose not to edit at all. The message is given in each email, including values presented through notification variables to identify the system phenomenon generating the notification. You can edit the sample HTML in place, copy and paste the sample HTML into a dedicated editor (pasting your changes back into the Message field), or paste in a completely different HTML form letter. Always keep notification variables in mind when editing this field, and exercise caution when removing or editing variables in the message block.
• In the Message block, exercise caution when developing HTML or plaintext emails. The variables used in both message types provide the useful information for every message, are dynamically updated by NetMRI when generating notifications, and should be preserved during editing. Test the notification messages based on the default formatting before making significant changes. You can click Restore Defaults at any time to recover the factory message formatting.

See Notification Variables and Setting Notification Defaults for more detail on variables for notification email content.