Hi all,

I've had the unlucky fun of being dumped into a problem with Patrol 3.4 on Solaris with a customer with virtually no Patrol training or information.  I have some manuals and am reading them, but they're not very clear on basic things like how e-mail alerts work.

I have figured out that the agents send the mail - that makes sense.

What I have going on right now is a couple of things:

- After an alert in the standard alert queue, the agent keeps e-mailing even after the problem has been cleared, and these appear to be coming from the Escalation queue.  Can anyone explain if the escalation queue is supposed to be acknowledged somehow, and also if all my customer is trying to do it have alerts for everyone in their group -- do they really need everyone also in the Escalation queue?

- My customer says they added a new e-mail to the People and to the Policy today and they never received any messages to that address, nor did it show up in the syslog on the Solaris machine running the agent that it ever attempted to mail that address.  Is there some special way they were supposed to add that, or some way to refresh the Agent(s) so they pick up such configuration changes?

Finally the original reason for this post.  I have ZERO visibility to this customer's system.  They operate and maintain the console.  However, I do have a PPP dial-up connection into their internal network.  Can I install the Windows console and point it at their Agents?  Can their Solaris console and my Windows Console both talk to the Agents and control them at the same time?  If I make changes to my console here, will it propagate to theirs?  

I know these are retarded questions, but I have been given virtually nothing as far as documentation goes, and BMC is certainly no help on 3.4.  They flat out refuse to do any support on it, even if I were to convince the boss to pay for it.  And guessing about how BMC's architecture is designed to work doesn't work very well!  

I appreciate any thoughts on how to quickly get up to speed on such an old product.  I'm an old Unix-head that can get around Unix just fine, but not even knowing where Patrol stores things or even having basic documentation makes this pretty painful!  

Thanks in advance!

Hi!

I think you should specify the product you use to send your email because this is no PATROL standard component (not in version 3.4 ... in V3.5 it is called Knowlegde Module for Eventmanagement).

As I remeber for 3.4 most customers used Proxima Technologys Alarmmanager to queue / escalate and send email so please tell us and we might be able to help.

Best regards ...

Timo

Timo Schmidt (Senior Consultant / BMC Certified Professionla)
http://www.patrol-forum.de

Ah, I think you're right.  The whole thing is "packaged" by another group here and released together, so I had no idea the AlarmManager piece was from another company.  

They install it to /var/patrol/PATROL3.4/AlarmManager, so your message is a bit of a surprise, but it makes sense...