How can I monitor PowerMTA queue sizes by domain and set up alerts for stuck emails?
Summary
What email marketers say10Marketer opinions
Email marketer from StackOverflow explains that you can set up alerts by parsing PMTA's accounting logs. The accounting logs contain detailed information about each message, including queue times. Using a log analysis tool or writing a custom script, you can filter the logs to identify messages that have been stuck in the queue for longer than a specified duration and generate alerts accordingly.
Email marketer from Email Marketing Blog shares that setting up alerts can be achieved using PMTA's accounting logs. These logs provide insights into message status and queue times, enabling you to detect stalled messages and trigger notifications.
Email marketer from Email Delivery Forums advises developing a custom monitoring tool that integrates with PowerMTA's accounting logs. By parsing these logs, you can track queue sizes per domain and trigger alerts based on specific conditions, such as a certain number of messages stuck in the queue for a prolonged period.
Email marketer from ReliableEmails shows how you can use tools like Grafana to visualise log data to identify problem domains.
Email marketer from Quora explains how to set thresholds and then use a script to pull the numbers. If anything is over that threshold you can then alert your team.
Marketer from Email Geeks shares a method to get queue sizes in JSON format from the PowerMTA web UI by accessing the '/domains?format=json' endpoint, which can be parsed by an external script.
Marketer from Email Geeks suggests checking the PMTA documentation for 'notify' directives and contacting Port25 support. Provides an example of the 'notify-of-delay-every' directive.
Email marketer from Email Delivery Forums notes that you can configure rsyslog to send PMTA logs and configure your system to alert you when the logs match a certain pattern.
Email marketer from Reddit suggests writing a script to periodically fetch queue statistics from PowerMTA's web UI (using the `/domains?format=json` endpoint) and then parse the JSON output to identify domains with a queue size exceeding a defined threshold. This script can then send an alert via email or other messaging service.
Email marketer from Reddit discusses how external monitoring solutions can automatically send alerts for different situations in your PMTA setup.
What the experts say2Expert opinions
Expert from Spam Resource shares that PowerMTA's comprehensive logging capabilities allow for integrating with external monitoring tools. These tools can then parse the logs, track queue sizes, and send alerts when defined conditions are met, such as exceeding queue size thresholds or identifying stuck messages.
Expert from Spam Resource explains that PowerMTA provides real-time metrics via a JSON feed that can be parsed and monitored. This allows for creating custom dashboards and alerts based on queue sizes per domain, and by using an external script, you can trigger notifications when thresholds are exceeded.
What the documentation says4Technical articles
Documentation from SparkPost Documentation shares that PowerMTA's web-based monitoring interface provides real-time insights into queue statistics. By accessing the web UI, you can view the number of messages queued for each domain, allowing you to identify domains with high queue volumes. Additionally, you can configure alerts based on these statistics using external monitoring tools.
Documentation from SparkPost Documentation details how real-time metrics from PMTA are easily accessible using a JSON feed. These metrics can be displayed in a management dashboard.
Documentation from Port25 Solutions Documentation explains that rollups can aggregate statistics for multiple domains or MX records, allowing for easier monitoring of queue sizes for groups of domains. By using `mx-rollup-list`, you can define rollups based on domain patterns and then monitor the aggregated queue sizes.
Documentation from Port25 Solutions Documentation describes that the `notify-of-delay-every` directive allows you to configure how often PowerMTA checks to see if delay notification messages should be sent. This can be set at the domain level, providing a way to monitor and receive notifications when messages are delayed in the queue for specific domains.