Enabling and Viewing Maintenance Notifications

Oracle automatically notifies you by email to let you know about maintenance-related activities, including the dates for next scheduled maintenance. You can expect email notifications for the following:

• 1 month before the start of a maintenance event
• 1 week before the start of a maintenance event
• Extension of a maintenance window
• Rescheduling of a maintenance event
• Cancellation of a maintenance event

You can also view past notifications for your tenancy at any time in the Console.

Fusion environments that have been converted to or provisioned on the new Oracle Cloud Console experience leverage the OCI Announcements Service to send email notifications. The Announcements service alerts customers to operational events that impact service status or their environments, such as maintenance activities. You can subscribe to announcements to receive them by email, SMS, or any other subscription protocol supported through integration with the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Notifications service. The announcements are also visible on the Oracle Cloud Console.

Announcements belong to different categories. An announcement prefix helps you understand, at a glance, the type and relative severity of the information and whether there's anything you can or must do. Announcement types currently include the following, in order of most important to least:

If you want to receive announcements through email or another delivery mechanism, you can manage the tenancy administrator email preferences or configure subscriptions.

Announcement subscriptions direct announcements that match specified filter criteria to your choice of endpoint (email, SMS, and others). Endpoints can be configured using topics in the Notifications service, which can have multiple recipients for a given subscription protocol. A topic is a communication channel for sending messages to its subscriptions.

To ensure you are aware of events that impact your Fusion environments, specific announcements subscriptions are preconfigured when a Fusion environment is provisioned. For each provisioned Fusion environment, an announcement subscription called "<Environment-System-Name>_Fusion_Application_Topic" is created. This ensures that all notifications related to the environment are sent to the recipients subscribed to the Fusion_Application_Topic for that environment.

For customers who have had their environments converted to the Oracle Cloud Console, two announcement subscriptions are automatically created to preserve their notification preferences in the legacy console:

• A planned maintenance subscription: Fusion_Planned_Maintenance_Converted_Announcement_Subscription.
• A general service announcement subscription: Fusion_Service_Announcements_Converted_Annoucement_Subscription.

You can create additional announcement subscriptions as needed to receive notifications.

The table below summarizes the announcements that subscribed users receive for the subscriptions that are automatically created:

The default administrator of the tenancy automatically receives e-mail notifications and can view notification announcements in the Console.

To allow other users in your organization to view notification announcements in the Console, an administrator must add them to a group with the following permission granted in a policy:

Allow group '<identity-domain-name'/'<your-group-name>' to read announcements in tenancy

A user with this permission can navigate to the Announcements page in the Console to view the details of the maintenance notifications. For more information about setting up groups and policies for Fusion Applications, see Managing Oracle Cloud Users with Specific Job Functions.

To enable other users in your organization to receive notifications via email or other channels (such as SMS), an administrator must create a subscription and add the user information to the subscription.

To create a subscription, you need the following additional policy permissions:

Allow group '<identity-domain-name'/'<your-group-name>' to manage announcement-subscriptions in tenancy
Allow group '<identity-domain-name'/'<your-group-name>' to manage ons-topics in tenancy

To view announcements in the Console:

1. In the Console, click the Announcements icon () on the top bar. The Overview page displays.
2. Click Announcements to display all announcements for your tenancy. To refine the list, you can:
   • Filter by start and end date
   • Filter by service. Select Oracle Fusion Applications from the Service list to view only announcements pertaining to your applications.
   • Select a tab to filter by type. For example, you can click Scheduled Maintenance to filter the list to only the scheduled maintenance notifications.

For more details about working with Announcements, see Console Announcements.

This task describes how to create an email subscription. For information about other options, see Console Announcements.

To create an email subscription for Oracle Fusion Applications announcements:

1. In the Console, click the Announcements icon () on the top bar. The Overview page displays.
2. Click Subscriptions and then click Create announcement subscription.
3. Enter a Name for the subscription. Avoid entering confidential information.
4. Optionally, enter a Description. Avoid entering confidential information.
5. Accept the default Compartment, or select the compartment where you want to create the subscription.
6. Choose Selected announcements only.
7. Define the Filter group:
   • Filter group name: enter a name, for example, "FA-Maintenance-Notifications".
   • Type: select Service.
   • Value: select Oracle Fusion Applications.

   These selections will include all announcements regarding Fusion Applications. To include only maintenance-related announcements, add another filter:

   • Click +Another filter.
   • Type: select Announcement type.
   • You can add multiple selections for Value. Select the following to include all maintenance announcements Scheduled maintenance, Emergency maintenance, Emergency maintenance extended, Emergency maintenance complete, Emergency maintenance rescheduled.
8. Maintenance Notification Announcements use UTC and English as the default time zone and language. If you wish to change these, under Display preferences, select the preferred Time zone for announcement time stamps and the preferred Language. (Note that the Language option is only available when you have selected the filter values Type: Service and Value: Oracle Fusion Applications.)
9. Define the Notifications topic:
   • Select Create new topic.
   • Accept the default Compartment, or select the compartment where you want to create the topic.
   • Enter a Name for the topic. Avoid entering confidential information.
   • Optionally, enter a Description. Avoid entering confidential information.
   • Subscription protocol: select Email.
   • Email address: enter the email address of the person to receive the email notifications. To add multiple people or addresses, click +Another subscription.
10. Click Create.

A confirmation email is sent to the email address entered. The recipient must click the Confirm subscription link in the email to activate the subscription.

To add more users to a subscription, like the one you created above, you must create a subscription for the user in the notification topic, as follows:

1. In the Console, click the Announcements icon (). The Overview page displays.
2. Click Subscriptions, The list of subscriptions is displayed. Click the name of the subscription to add the user to.
3. On the subscription detail page, click the Notification topic.
4. On the notification topic details page, click Create Subscription, then enter the following:
   • Protocol: select Email. For information about the other protocol options, see Creating a Subscription.
   • Email address: enter the email address of the person to receive the email notifications.
   • Click Create.

A confirmation email is sent to the email address entered. The recipient must click the Confirm subscription link in the email to activate the subscription.

As an administrator, you can subscribe to multiple topic subscriptions. During environment creation (or conversion, if your environments were converted), you can be added to multiple Announcements subscriptions that are created by default. This may result in duplicate notifications. If you are receiving duplicate notifications for the same environment and want to unsubscribe from the duplicate topics, you can do the following:

1. Review the emails associated with the environment and note down the following details:
   • The environment name or system name found in the body of the notification.

     To ensure that a notification is a duplicate, it is important to verify the environment that it pertains to, as you may receive notifications for multiple environments (test, development, production) that can appear to be duplicates.

   • The topic name. Scroll down to the bottom of the email and you will see information similar to the following:

     

2. Note the topic names provided on the notifications that you suspect to be duplicates. If they are different, then decide which of the topics you want to remain subscribed to, and go to the next step. If they are the same, go to Removing Duplicate Subscriptions.
3. For the topic you want to unsubscribe from, click the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email. The request to unsubscribe is confirmed.