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David Mackintosh
Asked: 2009-12-29 12:34:05 +0800 CST

APC Management Card Bombarding Me With Status Emails

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I have a APC Smart-UPS 3000 with a management card (I believe it is an AP9617).

So last night, I had an automatic weekly self-test run. The test failed, claiming I have at least one failed battery:

Dec 27 21:19:10 10.16.15.50 UPS: Started a self-test. 0x0137
Dec 27 21:19:12 10.16.15.50 UPS: At least one faulty battery exists. 0x0119
Dec 27 21:19:28 10.16.15.50 UPS: Failed a self-test. 0x0106

The management card obediently sent me two emails to tell me about this: one that the test had failed, and one that told me I have a faulty battery.

The problem is, every two minutes since then, it has sent me the same two emails. The device logs imply that the tests are not constantly re-running, so it looks like this is some kind of alert that needs to be cleared or acknowledged.

According to my email server logs, these are emails being generated by the management card -- they are not stuck or looping somehow in my email systems.

It is starting to bother the on-call guy. Now I can turn email notification off, but that sort of defeats the purpose of having it.

So does anyone know how to make it stop? Ideally without having to go in (since this is the holidays) or powering it off (there's stuff plugged into it for a reason).

Thanks.

email

7 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    In the defintion of the alert you can define the resend interval to be every 'x' minutes, and how many emails to send before giving up.

    • 5

  2. For anyone else searching for the answer:

    • log into web management
    • click Administration > Notification
    • click By Group on the left
    • click the Next >> button

    Follow the wizard to set the email or trap frequency to something more sane here.

    • 4

  3. There is no acknowledgement option for the alert. You'll continue to get the email alerts as long as the condition exists (battery needs replacement). What you can do in the mean time is to disable the email alert action for Warning and Severe events or disable the recipient.

    • 2

  4. I'm not onsite and so can't get into our Symmetra UPS at the moment to check the settings but I've seen this before.

    You can either turn off the alerting for that event (don't have to do so for everything) or simply increase the re-alarm rate to something longer, say 60 mins.

    • 1

  5. Under the web GUI for Logs..Syslog..Settings there appears to be settings for "Message Generation: Enable" and also "Severity Mapping" that might be able to silence or downgrade alerts.

    • 1

  6. I've had a few problems with the APC management cards. I've found that some options for setting up the alerts are only configurable from the telnet interface. And there are a few events that you can't control the alerts on such as when a low input voltage corrects it self. You can tell it not to alert you when you enter that condition but not when the condition corrects itself. Which is annoying if you happen to be in an older building that say as a compressor for an AC kicks on the voltage drops for 1 second resulting in a few emails a day. I moved my monitoring and alerting over to using SNMP and Nagios to work around APC's issues.

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  7. On APC "UPS Network Management Card 2" Smart-UPS/Matrix Application Webpage:

    1. Configuration Tab -> Notification -> Event Actions -> By Event -> Device
    2. Search 'Warranty' Click "UPS: Warranty expiring soon.Contact APC."
    3. Deselect E-Mail, Trap, Logs at will.
    4. Click 'Apply'
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