HD-PVR email Notification of Failures

[SkierHiker]

My new HD-PVR just failed for the first time and I lost numerous recordings until I noticed the failure messages on the information page. Is there any way to have SageTV notify me via email of a HD-PVR failure? That way I could immediately restart the HD-PVR and that would minimize the number of lost recordings.

[GKusnick]

The SageAlert plugin can do this. However it's not free; you'll have to buy a license to use the email feature (or else modify the source code to remove the licensing requirement).

[darcilicious]

If for some strange reason you don't feel like donating for the email feature you can use something like Growl to monitor the SageAlert messages and use Growl to send the email.

[SkierHiker]

Just curious, where do the HD-PVR failure messages get logged to? I'm a MS.Net developer so if I could get access to the messages, I could write my own simple app. It would be even better if they were logged to the Windows Event Log. It would then be a no-brainer to get notified.

Edit: I found it, file name 'sagetvmsgs.log'. Now I just have to write my small app to monitor it for HD-PVR failures. Still would be nice if Sage had an option to log messages to the event log.

[GKusnick]

You can access the system message queue programmatically using the SystemMessageAPI (which is how SageAlert does it).

Sage doesn't use the Windows event log because it's written in Java to run on other platforms besides Windows. For the same reason, the SageTV API is designed for Java rather than .Net. There's a third-party plugin that lets you access the API via HTTP, which would be callable from .Net. But if you're serious about developing for Sage, you're better off in the long run learning Java and using the Java-based API.

And again, SageAlert does exactly what you want already. That's its whole purpose: to provide real-time notification of system events via email, SMS, Twitter, etc.

[bigbill]

I bet you could use the free version of Splunk to monitor that log and send email when it finds the string you want. Actually it can monitor any log or inbound syslog from routers/switches.. whatever you have that you to log.