How to troubleshoot the Ektron Notification Service

  • Updated

This KB article shows how to troubleshoot issues with the notification services, and emails not being sent out.

While this post is designed to cover aspects of the Notification Service, if you are looking to go over notification emails, see Troubleshooting System Notification Emails instead.

Make sure notification service is running

Is it configured correctly?  

  • Check the Ektron.Notification.Service.exe.config and make sure the site is registered with the correct url and database connection.
  • <siteNotification>
  <sites>
    <add name="1"  url="http://siteurl"  connectionString="server=servername;database=cms400min;Integrated Security=true;user=;pwd=;"  />
  </sites>
</siteNotification>
  • If the URL or database connection are incorrect, fix them, and restart the Ektron Notification Service.

Enable tracing

  • Set loglevel to 4 in both the web.config and Ektron.Notification.Service.exe.config
  • You will need to restart the Ektron Notification Service before the config changes take effect.
  • Retry and check event log for errors and warnings.

Make sure activities are being published

Check activity_stream table to see if activity was recorded:

select * from activity_stream order by activityid desc

If Activity was not recorded:

  • Is Activity Publishing turned on in Workarea?
  • Does the user have activity publishing turned off for that event?

Check for entry in activity_stream_message table

select * from activity_stream_message order by activityid desc

If the activity has a message recorded, then the service is running and configured correctly.

If no message was present:

  • Is there a message defined for this activity?

Make sure SQL Server Broker Service is enabled

The SQL Server Broker Service is a message queuing system built into SQL Server. The notification system uses SQL Server Broker Service to queue up activities as they occur so that the Ektron Notification Service can process them in batches outside of the web request.

Check if Broker Service is enabled for that database:

select sys.databases.is_broker_enabled, * from sys.databases where  name = ''

If is_broker_enabled is 0:

alter database Intranet set enable_broker with rollback immediate

Are items making it to queue?

Shutoff the Ektron Notification service, raise an activity, and check the queue:

select * from activitypublishtargetqueue

There should be entries because the service is off and not processing them.

If there are no entries, but Activity publishing is on in the Workarea and for the user, then the problem may be with the broker service. 

If you are still running into issues after going through this checklist, contact Ektron Support (support@ektron.com | 1-603-816-2048).