Troubleshooting Visual Intercept Notifications

The successful delivery of Visual Intercept notifications is dependant upon the proper configuration of several aspects of the product. Failure to deliver e-mail notifications can be caused by:

1. A Visual Intercept contact document not containing a valid email address
2. An invalid notification rule
3. The Visual Intercept Notification Service either is not running or may be improperly configured
4. A problem with the SMTP server being used to deliver the email notifications

Testing Visual Intercept Notifications
This tech tip is focused on the mechanics of the delivery of notifications after a notification rule has been successfully applied. When testing notification services keep in mind that it is designed to suppress self-notifications and will not deliver a notification that is generated by the same person to whom it would be delivered. As an example, if a user "user1" submitted an incident that was assigned to "user1" and there was a rule to notify assigned users of new incidents, "user1" would not receive a notification. In this case "user1" was both the notification generation and destination user, thus the service would suppress the email.

To test the notification service:

1. Open a Visual Intercept Project document and choose the Contacts tab.
2. Select the Add Contacts option and execute the All Contacts query.
3. Navigate to your contact document, place a check-mark in the Attached column and select OnChange from the Notification field. (Note: The OnChange rule is the simplest, most effective rule to use when testing notification issues.)
4. Update the change to this project.
5. Click on the link for your attached contact, to launch your contact document and verify that your email address is entered correctly in the E-mail field.
6. Log out of Visual Intercept and then logon as "isadmin".
7. Create a new incident under the project selected in step 1.
8. Insert the incident and then make changes to the standard parameters fields (e.g., Status, Priority, Severity, and Category) and Update these changes. (Note: Changes made to the Incident text fields do not trigger notification events.)
9. Depending upon the interval specified in your Notification Service properties, you should receive an email within a couple of minutes.

Visual Intercept Notification Service Configuration
To check the configuration of the Visual Intercept notification service:

1. Open the Visual Intercept Services Manager from the Visual Intercept program group, and click the Notification tab.
2. Verify that you have a service listed as Running. If the service is listed as Stopped, highlight it, select the Start; button. Test notifications as outlined above.
3. If the service is listed as Running, highlight the service name and select Properties.
4. Select the Notification Options tab and verify the following:
   1. The Update Interval is set to an amount of time between 5 and 120 seconds
   2. The Enable E-mail Notification option is selected
   3. The correct IP address or name of your SMTP server has been entered
   4. The fully-qualified path to the notification template file is valid. This file is located at C:\Program Files\Visual Intercept Enterprise\isnotesv.tpl by default.
5. Select Applyfor any changes that you have made and click OK to close the Notification Properties dialog.
6. Test notifications as outlined above.

SMTP Server Configuration
Based on network settings, it is possible that the notification service cannot communicate with the SMTP server. To verify that you can access the SMTP server from this machine, go to the machine running the Visual Intercept notification service and:

1. Open a command prompt window by selecting Start | Run..., enter cmd and click OK.
2. At the command prompt, type the following: Telnet <SMTP IP Address> 25 and press Enter, where <SMTP IP Address> is the IP address configured for your notification service.
3. If you can successfully connect to port 25 of your SMTP server, it will typically return an SMTP code of 220.
4. If telnet fails to connect, contact your SMTP administrator for more information about your environment.
5. To close the telnet session, type Quit.

Enabling Visual Intercept Notification Logging
If, after reviewing the above settings, you are still not receiving notifications, Visual Intercept provides a mechanism for logging email-based notification issues. These logs record communications between the Visual Intercept Notification service and the SMTP server and returns detailed information on what may be happening.

To enable Notification logging:

1. Create a directory in which the log file is to be stored. (e.g., C:\Program Files\Visual Intercept Enterprise\viNotifyLog)
2. Open regedit by selecting Start | Run..., enter regedit and click OK.
3. Navigate to the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Elsinore\Intercept
4. In the right-hand pane, right-click and select New | String Value from the menu options
5. Name the new string value Logging
6. Right-click the Logging string and select Modify from the menu options.
7. In the Edit String | Value data field, enter the fully qualified path to the directory created in step 1 (i.e., C:\Program Files\Visual Intercept Enterprise\viNotifyLog)
8. Re-start the Visual Intercept notification service to start logging.

After you have initiated logging, logon to Visual Intercept and re-test notifications by following the steps outlined in section 1 above. Once this is done, you should have some entries written to the log file located in the specified notification log directory. Contact Elsinore Technical Support at and a support representative will interpret your log file and offer suggestions on addressing any specific errors that may appear in the log.

If you have other questions about issues not included in or beyond the scope of this Tech Tip, please contact Elsinore Technical Support Services at or 866.866.0034, option 2.