Best practice forum (Archived)

Program Exception Email Notifications to Admins

I need clarification on something. Are Program exception notifications supposed to be sent out via email (Totara 2.5)? Alerts get created correctly on the My Learning alerts block, but Site admins are not receiving email. We've been troubleshooting all aspects, database, mail server logs, tcp packets. It is seeming to me that program exceptions only go to alerts block and never to email. Is that incorrect?

If program exception notifications are supposed to get sent as email to site administrators, then what are some causes for that not happening? It is a Totara application specific issue, not mail servers or SMTP. We have full access to mail server and mail logs, and Totara is definitely not sending this email, or generating it in the first place.

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I was finally able to confirm that the main site administrator did receive the program exception notification. It seemed that the exceptions notifications weren't getting sent out when the exceptions were based on individuals added to a program. When a user was added to a program by virtue of the user's organization, and an exception was generated, then the email notification was sent out. I could be wrong on that but that is the way it seemed to be working.

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After further testing, it turns out that the main site admin also receives program exception email when just adding individuals to a program which cause exceptions. Still trying to figure out why there seems to be inconsistency in the notifications.

FYI I temporarily changed the cron run interval for program daily and hourly cron runs, so that I can get immediate feedback while troubleshooting and running cron manually.

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It appears that only the user specified as the "main" site administrator receives the notification.

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In this particular case, the problem with program notifications was being caused by an error in the processing of program recurrence cron. This error was killing the cron job and anything after the program recurrence cron was not executing, which included program notifications.

Since the error with the program recurrence cron is a separate issue, we won't go in to that here.

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Thanks for the research and followup Jamie. Just for clarity, was the error in processing cron that you found a bug or something to do with the implementation of this particular site?

Thanks!

Lori

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Hi Lori. Thanks for checking. The error is with a program recurring course. When I disable those functions in the program daily cron it effectively bypasses the fault causing the issue. It was something about a duplicate ID and a course no longer existing. I need to spend more time looking in to it, it is probably just a matter of deleting a defunct program I presume. It might be considered a bug in the recurring program cron, but I'm not sure how it came to be so not for sure.

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