Configure SMTP Notification channel

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is the standard protocol for email services. With this, you can send and receive emails on a TCP/IP network. In BizTalk360, SMTP is used to send email alerts to the users. In addition to that, if you want to send alerts to an email distribution list, then you can configure the custom SMTP notification channel and you can also specifically notify Up and AutoCorrect Alert to respective users.

Use case - Create an email distribution group (mailing list) using the SMTP Channel

There might be a situation where you need to notify the status of BizTalk Application artifacts to a group of people based on the business needs This can be achieved using the SMTP notification channel by creating multiple email recipient groups and mapping the SMTP channel to respective alarm which has been configured to monitor the BizTalk Application artifacts. The same SMTP channel can be used for multiple alarms.
For example, if you want to notify BizTalk360 alerts to the support or the development team, you can create an email distribution list for each team, by adding the recipients email id’s in SMTP Notification Channel. This SMTP Channel can be used in multiple alarms, which reduces the effort to configure an email list on each and every alarm.

Configuring SMTP Channel in BizTalk360

To configure the SMTP Notification channel, follow below steps:

• Log into the BizTalk360 application
• Click the Settings icon found at the top right corner of the page
• Click Monitoring and Notification from the Menu panel on the left side of the screen
• Click Manage Notification Channels
• Select the checkbox against the SMTP Channel name (B360.Notifier.SMTP) and click Configure
• Enter the list of email recipients whom you want to notify the BizTalk360 alerts and enter the recipients to get notified on CC
• To use the different recipients for “Up Alerts” and “AutoCorrect Alerts”, select the checkbox Use Different recipients for Up Alert and Auto Correct Alert
• Click the Configure button to save the SMTP configuration settings

Once you clicked the Configure button, the Is Configured field in the SMTP notification channel grid changes from No to Yes

The following table provides descriptions of the configuration fields and indicates whether they are required. The section that follows this table provides example configurations.

Follow the illustration below to set up a SMTP channel in BizTalk360.

Configure the SMTP Notification channel to the alarm, by enabling the channel as below.

How to Customize SMTP Notification Channel

In BizTalk360 Monitoring, the user gets notified through different types of alert such as:

Down alert - will be triggered when a violation occurs for the mapped artifact and the expected state is different from the current state
Up Alert - will get triggered when all the configured artifacts are in Healthy state, a violation is rectified or after the autocorrect has happened
Auto Correct Alert - will be triggered when the autocorrect is enabled and the system tries to rectify the violation to make BizTalk Environment healthy
Regular Alert - will be triggered based on the configuration of a Health alarm with the current status of the artifacts mapped to the alarm
Data Monitoring Alert - will be triggered when a violation occurs on the scheduled Data Monitoring alarm

By using the above notification type, we have added Up and Auto Correct alert grouping to the SMTP Notification Channel. Once the user configured the different Email recipients for Up Alert and the Auto Correct Alert as below, then the configured recipients will get notified, in case of an Up or Auto Correct alert happening.

For Instance, if the user wants a Down Alert to be sent to the Support team for further investigation and then an Up alert or Auto Correct alert will be sent to the QA team for intimation. In such cases, you can configure the Support team recipients to the “Email To” and Up and Auto Correct Alert with a QA team recipients. Next, map the channel to the alarm and once the violation occurs it will send the Down alert to the configured recipient in the “Email To” and the same for the Up and Auto Correct alert.

Based on your business needs, you can enhance this SMTP Notification channel by using the project file which is available in GitHub. For example, you need to send the Data Monitoring Alert to the BizTalk Developer team, then you can add the Data Monitoring Alert field to the channel using the code available in Git Hub Project Files.
To customize the SMTP Notification channel, follow the blog link for more information.