The specified string is not in the form required for an e-mail address

Several of my custom alerts, the worked during testing, are no longer sending emails. When I go into Action Manager and test the Send an Email/Page, I get the error "The specified string is not in the form required for an e-mail address." When I dig into this the string appears correct. Can anyone tell me what I'm missing. The custom property does exist.

${N=SwisEntity;M=CustomProperties.System_Owner}

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bourlis

Jduehmig,

The devil is in the details. What is the alert centered on, i.e. component, node, interface, application, drive, or something else? If you trying to leverage the custom property for simple node alert you can drop everything but the the actual System_Owner field. Which would look something like this:

Here's a simple hack that you can use that might help you. Create a new email alert then put your email address in the to line, this is just in case you accidently send the alert. Next in the email body put all the different variations of the same variable, for example:

${_Primary_Contact}
${N=SwisEntity;M=HardwareInfo.Node.CustomProperties._Primary_Contact}
${N=SwisEntity;M=Application.Node.CustomProperties._Primary_Contact}

Then simulate email by using the item the alert is based off of. The working variable will shown in the simulation.

jduehmig

bourlis,

Thanks for the reply. The alerts I am working with involve Nodes. I have one alert, Windows Node in Critical State, that I created during the alerts training module online. This one works! So now I'm working on Node is in a Warning or Critical State. I have copied the To: address AND the message body directly from the alert that is working, and it fails with the error above. So I'm very confused why it would work with a custom alert I built but won't work with an out of the box alert. Any thoughts on this?

Thanks,
Joe

bourlis

Joe,

Sorry I just need to get a base line of your issue:

You created a custom node down alert, to which you used a custom property to send the alerts to and this works.
You then edited a stock alert and used a custom property to send alerts to and this one doesn't work.

Is this correct?

If so, are you using the exact same custom property? If you manually enter the custom property into the stock email or did you manually enter it?

If the above is correct, I actually had a similar issue 6 months ago. In my case I discovered that I manually entered a custom property twice and somehow SolarWinds accepted it with a space. It wasn't noticeable in the Web UI, but it was obvious in the DB. In my case the fix was to simply delete both custom properties and then re-enter.

This has taught me a good troubleshooting skill..., role back to what you know works and build up from there. For example here's what I would do if I were you.

Manually enter the email address in the stock alert and test it. If successfully proceed, if it fails then troubleshoot from there.
Create a new email custom property using your email address. Assign that new custom property to the working alert and test it. If successful proceed, if fails then troubleshoot from there.
Assign the new custom property that worked from the previous test to the node with the stock alert and test. If successful proceed, if fails then troubleshoot from there.
If successful then the root cause of the original issue is related to custom property that you were using. If it fails then the issue is with the stock alert, in that case copy the custom alert that works, edit the copied alert to meet your needs and test again.

FYI... as a good practice never edit or use stock alerts. You should only copy and use edited copied alerts. In fact I would go one step farther and disable all stock alerts and enable only newly managed alerts or copied and edited alerts.

jduehmig

Thanks bourlis. Yes, it is the same custom property. I've gone through the troubleshooting steps but haven't found a fix yet. I will continue to work on it.

JOe