Making RMM Notifications work for you in N‑central

Over the years I have spoken with many prospects and partners about changing RMM solutions. When I’d ask the question “Why did you change?”, often the answer would be that their previous solution was too noisy when it came to generating email notifications. The sheer volume of notifications that some RMM solutions generate can make it very difficult for users to see the wood from the trees, resulting in important notifications being missed. 

N‑central has a good balance when it comes to notifications, with approximately 36 pre-configured out of the box. In this blog we are going to look at how N‑central notifications work, and how you can tweak them so that they are of greater value to you and your organization.

How do N‑central notifications work?

Before we started to make changes to the default notifications, lets take a moment to ensure we understand how notifications work. A Notification Profile is comprised two elements:

1. The Profile Details tab—Here you can configure who is notified and when they are notified
2. The Trigger Details tab—This allows you to configure what causes the notification to be sent

By adding or removing recipients from the Profile Details tab, you can ensure that RMM notifications are only being sent to those that need them. Also, if you have no recipients selected on the profile details tab, then no notifications will be sent.

On the Trigger Details tab, you’ll see the services/service instances and the status that will cause the notification to be sent. Each of these triggers is applied to devices via rules, so if you remove the selected rules from the trigger, it will also stop notifications being sent (you can leave everything else in the profile intact). This is useful if you have multiple triggers in a notification profile, but you only want to temporarily disable some.

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Streamlining Notifications

Now that we know how notifications work, it’s time to review how you have configured your notifications, and streamline them to suit your needs. 

Notification Profiles are one of the few areas of N‑central where you can delete the out of the box configurations at the SO level. If you’re planning on doing this and thinking to yourself, “I’ll just start from the ground up”—DON’T.  You’ll be creating unnecessary work for yourself. The default N‑central notifications are there for a reason: they are the ones that are most commonly used by users.

Instead of starting from the ground up, go through each notification profile to understand what it alerts on. For those you don’t want to receive, as mentioned above, simply remove any selected recipients from the profiles tab. You can also rename these notification profiles to include “Not Currently in Use”, so you and your colleagues know what’s going on. By leaving unused profiles there and not deleting them, you can easily bring them into use in the future if you need to.

So, it’s pretty easy to get a handle on notifications you don’t want to receive, but what about the notifications that you want for some clients but not for others? Maybe you have different tiers of support packages and you want to prioritise notifications for your “Gold Level” clients, or maybe you have some break/fix clients in your N‑central instance that shouldn’t generate notifications in the same way as your managed clients… how do you handle that? 

By default, as mentioned above, the Notification Profiles target devices via rules, and the rules we use are prebuilt rules like Laptops, Windows/Server, Windows etc. that also, by default, deploy monitoring templates and apply basic configuration. In order to apply different Notifications Profiles to different clients in N‑central, you will need to separate out the monitoring portion of the rule from the notification portion. While this might feel of a pain, it’s short-term pain for long-term gain.  Having rules specifically for notification purposes will give you far more flexibility when if comes to configuring notifications for your clients. 

To implement this, follow these steps with you existing rules:

• Select one of the Rules, then navigate to the Monitoring Options tab and take note of all of the default Notification Profile – Trigger(s). Then remove them all.
• Add a New Rule and name it accordingly, targeting the same filtered group of Devices
• Select the Monitoring Options tab, add back in all of the previously noted and removed triggers
• Select the Grant Customer/Sites Access Tab, select which customer you want to receive notifications for
• Repeat that process until you have separated all notification profiles into their own rules

These are just a few examples of how you can modify notifications to enhance how you use N‑central to manage and maintain your clients. If you feel like you’ve been getting too many, or too few, notifications, hopefully this blog will inspire you to address that. We are always looking to build new content that will benefit our users and if you think you’d benefit from a notification specific Boot Camp, please let me know and I’d be happy to look into it. 

If you have questions join me on the N-Central office hours at www.n-able.com/events.  For more insight on how you can get the most out of N‑central, you can attend our N‑central Boot Camps, recordings of which are available in the N‑able U, alternatively keep an eye on www.n-able.com/events to register for the live sessions.

Paul Kelly is the Head Nerd at N‑able. You can follow him on Twitter at @HeadNerdPaul, LinkedIn and Reddit at u/Paul _Kelly