05 - Email Alerts Tab

SubTopics → Creating an Email Alert | Type frame | Watch frame | Categories frame | Editing an Email Alert | Deleting an Email Alert | Bottom

The Reports → Email Alerts tab is for creating customized email alerts to keep you aware of specific access events.  Email Alerts are typically sent to the iPrism administrator each time a certain type of event occurs, or a certain threshold of activity is exceeded.

Email Alerts are useful when profile ACLs are configured to monitor activity, instead of blocking it. Here are some examples of situations where you would use email alerts:

• You want to be immediately notified every time a particular employee surfs for more than two megabytes of material from the job/employment search category in any 1 hour time frame.

• You want to be immediately notified whenever any workstation whose profile monitors pornographic material attempts to surf to more than 10 Web pages with pornographic content within 10 minutes.

• You want to receive an email when the combined bandwidth from all workstations within a low-priority Internet lab exceeds one hundred megabytes during any 30 minute period.

Once created, email alerts can be disabled/enabled, so you will only be notified of events when you want to be.

Creating an Email Alert

To create an email alert:

1. From Reports → Email Alerts → Email Alerts List frame, click Add, which will activate the Type, Watch, and Categories frames explained below.

ADM135a - Email Alerts List

Note: the "Example" email alert is meant to illustrate the details of an email alert. You may  Delete "Example" if you wish.

Type frame

2. In the Type frame, specify whose activity you want to monitor.

ADM135b - Type

3. Any - The access of any user (or from any workstation) will be considered when determining if alert conditions are met.

4. User - Only the specified user will be tracked for alert consideration. Enter the user’s iPrism username or the workstation’s IP address in the associated text box.

5. Profile - Only users monitored by the selected profile will be considered. Choose the profile from the drop-down list.

6. IP Range - Only workstations that have an IP address within the specified IP range will be monitored for alert events. To track a single workstation, type the workstation's IP number in both the Network frame → IP Start and IP end fields.

Watch frame

3. In the Watch frame, select which parameter should be watched and specify the threshold of activity that will cause an email alert to be sent.

ADM135c - Watch

• Threshold - This is always an integer value and can represent kilobytes, pages, hits, or time spent, depending on what you select in the Data field below.

4. Data - This defines what parameter goes with the Threshold value you entered above. To aid in the understanding of these parameters, the following descriptions tell you what would happen with the Threshold value set to ”r;10”.

Bandwidth (KB) - An email alert will be sent every time 10 kilobytes of data is accessed by those defined in the Type frame within the time range specified in the Time span field.

Pages - An email alert will be sent every time 10 pages are accessed by those defined in the Type frame within any time span. A page is defined as an HTML access with a MIME content type of text/*. This includes blocked attempts as well.

Hits - An email alert will be sent every time 10 web accesses of any content type are accessed by those defined in the Type frame within any time span. Generally, Pages are a more useful selection type than Hits, since Hits will track data for every access (images, etc.), even though they all fall within a single page.

Session Duration (minutes) - An email alert will be sent after the user(s) specified in the Type frame have spent more than 10 minutes within any time span. Since it is impossible for computer software alone to track exactly how long someone spends browsing at a particular site, real world usage heuristics have been used to approximate the time spent browsing.

• Time span - This is the duration over which the email alert tracker counts access information. Anytime the number of counts exceeds the threshold value within this time span, an email alert is sent.

• Grouped - Instead of tracking information for individual users or workstations (defined in the Type frame), enabling this checkbox will cause iPrism to track the accesses of all members in the group and combine them to determine if an email alert should be sent.

Note: This selection will have no effect if the Type selected is User, or if the IP Range specifies a single workstation.

Categories frame

5. In the optional Categories frame, you can narrow the scope of the alert event even further by requiring that the web accesses be to sites that belong to one of the categories you specify here.

To select (or deselect) categories, click the Set button to open the Email Alerts-Category List window and select the desired categories. When finished, click the OK button to close this window.

6. In the Adding Email Alerts frame, enter a descriptive name for this alert in the Name field.

7. If you want this email alert to be disabled (i.e. inactive) for now, check the Disabled check box.

8. In the Recipient box, enter the email address of the person to whom email alert notifications should be sent.

Tip: Generally, the email generated by an email alert is sent at the same exact time that the specified threshold is exceeded. But occasionally (under heavy load), the email delivery can be delayed for as long as five minutes.

9. Click the OK button. The new email alert item is added to the drop-down list in the Email Alerts List frame.

Editing an Email Alert

1. From Reports → Email Alerts → Email Alerts List frame, select the alert to edit from the drop-down list. (If the list is grayed out, click the OK or Cancel button at the bottom of the tab to close the current editing session.) AddStart the iPrism Configuration tool.

2. Make your changes and click OK.

Note: If you change the name of an alert, the new name replaces the old name. A new alert will not be created.

Deleting an Email Alert

If you no longer require the service of an email alert, you can remove it from the system.

1. From Reports → Email Alerts → Email Alerts List frame, select the alert to delete from the drop-down list and click Delete.