System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) is a great tool for monitoring your infrastructure. Configured correctly, it can let you know when things go awry, and even take action to fix the problem. But what happens when it stops speaking to you?
When you set up SCOM, one of the first things that you want to do is set up some notifications. Notifications are not to be confused with alerts. Alerts are what you see in the console. Notifications are what you get in your mailbox or on your cell phone (in the form of SMS messages).
Email notifications require an upstream SMTP server, such as Exchange, Mercury, or even the SMTP service which is part of Internet Information Services (IIS). I’ve recently been setting up a new SCOM environment, and found that alerts were being generated, however, notifications were not going out. SCOM knew something was wrong, though, and gave me a pile of alerts like this:
Summary
A Notification was not delivered successfully. This was due to an invalid recipient address in the subscription.
Causes
The address entered in the recipient wizard while creating the notification recipient was incorrect. Notification subsystem was unable to send the notification to the provided address. Notification was not delivered to the address.
Resolutions
Check the recipient(s) associated with the address. The address provided for the recipient may be incorrect, invalid or mistyped. The invalid address is listed in the alert description. Valid address for Email and IM is a valid email address such as opsmgradmin@microsoft.com. In the case of SMS, a valid address is the phone number in the format + . For example, +14258828080
So, I began searching around for other folks who had a similar problem. Not many did, and all the articles I read explained that blocking of port 25 was the culprit. Not the case for me. I turned off the firewall for testing, and the mail server (an IIS machine) was on the same subnet.
My biggest tip: investigate the event viewer on the IIS box. I found that the SCOM server was not allowed to relay through the IIS machine. Once I turned allowed the SCOM server to relay (through configuration settings in the SMTP service), alerts went off without a hitch.
Sometimes it’s the simple things that slow us down!