NS Notification Policy for Recovery Cluster Status

Our Recovery Solution environment has grown from 2 massive, overloaded RS boxes, to over 13 smaller, lower node count, VM-based, single node clusters. The upside is that SSM can run successfully every night, the downside is that it is incredibly difficult to keep up with ensuring all the boxes are functioning properly (not that RS even dies for no good reason, leaving the AeXVault service running, but no snapshot scheduling or anything like that....)! So, after a bit of trial and error I came up with the attached Notification Policy that checks the status of all the RS clusters in your system, counts the # of successful snapshots in the past 6 hours, and the time of the most recent snapshot, then mails it out to the addresses specified in the Email Automated Action section.

This also provides an example of using SQL cursors to iterate through a result set row by row, and a temp table. It is probably not quite as "clean" as it could be (I don't check for the existence of the temp table before creating it again), but it gets the job done.

A few customizations will need to be done. First and minimally, the Email Automated Action should be modified to set valid email addresses. As per the example addresses I pre-populated, you can use multiple addresses separated by semicolons (;), including SMTP-formatted distribution list addresses. The message text can be modified and you can use standard HTML tags if you want to make it prettier, but the %Results% line must be left on a line by itself. Secondly, if you want to run the report on just a subset of RS clusters in your environment, uncomment the WHERE clause in the cursor definition and filter by name or whatever other criteria you might have. Finally and also optionally, you can modify the _Hours parameters used to change the number of hours to check for snapshots within; I used 6 but you can use whatever you want. And of course you can change the schedule.