Dell Openmanage Server Administrator is a really useful tool for configuring and monitoring server hardware but it lacks built in E-Mail alerting or notifications.

The software is capable of calling external programs or scripts when a server alert is triggered so I have written a simple script that provides E-Mail alert functionality.

There are a couple of scripts out there that do similar, but I wanted something self contained and capable of using SMTP Authentication with an external relay.

The other problem with OMSA is that you need to go into each individual alert to configure the settings which can be very time consuming, I wanted a way to add them all automatically as I am going to install the script on a number of servers.

Install the script by extracting the DellAlert.Vbs script file from this zip file:

Dell OMSA E-Mail Alerts

Once you have extracted the zip file you will need to edit the variables at the top of the script to make them appropriate for your environment:

The variables at the top define the e-mail settings and are hopefully self explanatory. If a remote SMTP server is not specified the local machine will be used to send the E-Mail.

Below these you can to decide what events you want to be notified of, just comment out any that you aren’t interested in, e.g:

AlertConfig(0)="powersupply|Power supply failure"
AlertConfig(1)="powersupplywarn|Power supply warning"
'AlertConfig(2)="tempwarn|Temperature warning"
'AlertConfig(3)="tempfail|Temperature failure"


I have included every alert available in OMSA 6.2 on a PE T710, some of these alerts won’t be available on older versions or machines.

After you have configured the script, I suggest you test that the E-Mail options by running:

cscript dellalert.vbs testemail

You should receive a test e-mail, if not something isn’t working properly.

When you have successfully tested e-mail, configure OMSA to send alerts by running:

cscript dellalert.vbs setup

You will then see the script go through and setup all the appropriate alerts as per your settings. This process can take a couple of minutes as the “omconfig” command takes a while. This step will not work if you do not have OMSA installed.

Once this is done you should be able to see that the script has been added into OMSA:

Now you need to generate some real alerts to test the script properly. How you do this will depend on the capabilities of your server, I was able to disconnect the redundant power supply and have an alert generated almost immediately. I think opening the case will also generate an event, but I am not sure as I didn’t test. Hopefully you should get something like this in your Inbox:

I have installed this on a few servers and it seems to be working well. I will update the script with any tweaks that I add as I roll it out further. Hope this is useful to someone else.

If you are using Exchange 2007…..

This script will not work properly until you register the 32-Bit version of cdo.dll.  Follow the instructions for doing this here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/mstehle/archive/2007/12/11/fyi-after-installing-exchange-2007-sp1-32-bit-cdosys-might-not-be-registered.aspx