I did some searching on this subject in THWACK and found some very old or dead links so I figured let's start a new thread. We have an onsite SMTP server but what do others use as a secondary SMTP if the primary goes down? Thanks! -Dave
In a past life I set up a gmail account to handle emergency backup SMTP server duties. More recently I actually hardly use email, first action for everything is just a call to our event managment platform (currently netcool, soon to be bigpanda). We dedupe and route everything from there. Secondary notifications might go out to MS teams situationally but its just really rare to do alerts directly to email for me now so I haven't revisited it in a while.
We don't use the secondary at all, the primary is an alias in front of some traditional HA elements, a GSLB to get it to an active Data Center, which is in front of VIPs that have the various SMTP relay's in it. All SMTP traffic goes into security appliances first, then into our mail systems.
I originally pointed all smtp traffic from Solarwinds to a load-balanced smtp server solution hosted behind a pair of active-active F5's. Any smtp server can fail (up to seven of them) and mail still flowed (via the 8th). Later, Management required I drop the smtp in favor of syslog messaging, which was sent to our resilient Splunk solution. This was perhaps better than smtp because Splunk has better parsing & interpretation & pattern recognition & search capabilities. So no secondary smtp solution was ever required in either scenario.
This is why I really enjoy THWACK. I read all of your answers and now am thinking why do I need a secondary SMTP server we have other options. Thanks everyone!!!
