When a target becomes unavailable or if performance thresholds are reached, Enterprise Manager generates alerts in the Grid Control Console and notifies you and other appropriate administrators.

Notifications are configured using Notification Methods and Notification Rules. A notification method defines the devices used for sending notifications. These include email, SNMP traps, OS commands and scripts, and PL/SQL procedures. Once defined, these methods can then be used with Notification Rules for sending notifications to administrators as a result of alert occurrences.

A notification rule is a set of conditions that determine when a notification occurs. Conditions include severity conditions (clear, warning, critical) based on the metrics of a target that would trigger a notification. During notification rule creation, you can associate the rule with multiple notification methods.The Grid Control notification system passes severity information to an OS script notification method via system environment variables.