You and your admin team are a well-oiled machine of Relativity maintenance, support, and improvement. Some of their tasks—like processing and imaging jobs—mean your admins need to plan for some wait time between stages in a particular function. Especially if your Relativity instance is a large one, those wait times can make or break your team’s efficiency for the day. How can they best use this time if they’re worried about monitoring those ongoing jobs because the legal team needs an immediate update at each stage of the process—or because any errors will need to be addressed without delay?
To help tackle that challenge, site admins can set up Relativity to send an email notification when errors occur within the system, as well as when productions, index populations, and data import operations complete or fail. This allows your admin team to spend more time working on other tasks without keeping a continuous eye on ongoing operations—and to be quickly notified when errors do occur so the problems can be addressed immediately.
Relativity SMTP Notifications
To enable these email notifications, a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server must be made available to the Relativity servers. Please note that this article assumes that there is already an SMTP server ready for use.
From within the settings of any Relativity firewall, ensure port 25 is open and relaying is allowed from the web and agent servers. This may be as simple as editing the Windows Firewall on each server, or may require you contact your network administration team.
The Relativity E-mail Test Utility is available for download on the Relativity Customer Portal to test SMTP relaying. This simple tool can be launched on any Relativity server to test sending emails through the designated SMTP server.
Next, there are some variables within the EDDS.eddsdbo.Configuration table we’ll want to update to make Relativity aware of the SMTP server. These settings are all under the Relativity.Notification section as seen below.
Update the following four SMTP variables from within SQL Server Management Studio:
EmailFrom The email address populated in the "from" field when sending email notifications.
EmailTo The email address populated in the "to" field when sending email notifications.
EnvironmentName The name of the environment. This is used when sending error notifications.
SMTPServer The SMTP server name or IP address used to send notifications.
Send Email Notification upon Completion or Failure allows you to send email notifications when your production or index population fails or completes. Enter the email address(es) of the recipient(s) who should receive these notifications. If you’re including multiple recipients, separate the entries with a semicolon.
This setting is available in the production and index property pages of any workspace. From here, you can enter one or more email addresses or distribution lists.
SMTP notifications for import operations performed via the Relativity Desktop Client are handled a little differently than indexes and productions. For these operations, there is an entry in the EDDS.eddsdbo.Configuration called SendNotificationOnImportCompletionByDefault. By default this is set to False; setting it to True will notify users on import success or failure.
Unlike the index and production notifications, there’s no form to enter one or more email addresses. Instead, it will automatically email the user who logged into the RDC to perform the import.
Once all of these settings are filled, your admin team should start getting job notifications right away.
Error Alert Management
It’ll be a big time saver to see updates from Relativity whenever a particular job is finished, but getting a timely notification of any errors that occur within the system can also help your admin team catch problems early and resolve them quickly—without requiring your users to track them down for help. In just a few more steps, you can customize your instance’s error notification settings, too.
By default, if the ErrorTo field in the EDDS.eddsdbo.Configuration table is populated, notifications of errors will be sent based on error text and severity levels set as default within the software. You can, however, tweak these settings for your environment from the EDDS database. By following the instructions below, you can add or remove errors that should trigger email alerts, as well as specify different recipients for different alert levels.
The steps below describe how to configure severity levels for errors in your environment and receive emails at designated addresses.
1. Locate the ErrorSeverity and SeverityEmail tables within the EDDS database, and open these tables.
2. Within the SeverityEmail table, input a severity between 1 and 10—the lower the number, the higher the severity—and then an email address. For example:
3. Locate an error message and input the Message and Full Error information into the Message and FullText columns of the ErrorSeverity table.
4. Assign that message a severity level. The address specified for that severity level will receive an email with the error message.
Adjusting these severity levels and recipient lists mean you can tailor Relativity to prioritize the right issues for the right people, ensuring an efficient workflow for identifying and addressing errors at any time of the day.
Every day, your organization’s Relativity team handles critical case data and enables business functions that rely on that data to operate smoothly. By enabling SMTP notifications in your instance, you can empower your team to peel their attention off of the waiting game and focus on delivering the hands-on attention they specialize in, allowing projects to proceed more effectively.
If you have any questions or concerns about these workflows, please let us know. We’re happy to help.