Custom

Netdata Agent's alert notification feature allows you to send custom notifications to any endpoint you choose.

Setup

Prerequisites

• Access to the terminal where Netdata Agent is running

Configuration

File

The configuration file name for this integration is health_alarm_notify.conf.

You can edit the configuration file using the edit-config script from the Netdata config directory.

cd /etc/netdata 2>/dev/null || cd /opt/netdata/etc/netdata
sudo ./edit-config health_alarm_notify.conf

Options

The following options can be defined for this notification

Config Options

Name	Description	Default	Required
SEND_CUSTOM	Set SEND_CUSTOM to YES	YES	yes
DEFAULT_RECIPIENT_CUSTOM	This value is dependent on how you handle the ${to} variable inside the custom_sender() function.		yes
custom_sender()	You can look at the other senders in /usr/libexec/netdata/plugins.d/alarm-notify.sh for examples of how to modify the function in this configuration file.		no

DEFAULT_RECIPIENT_CUSTOM

All roles will default to this variable if left unconfigured. You can edit DEFAULT_RECIPIENT_CUSTOM with the variable you want, in the following entries at the bottom of the same file:

role_recipients_custom[sysadmin]="systems"
role_recipients_custom[domainadmin]="domains"
role_recipients_custom[dba]="databases systems"
role_recipients_custom[webmaster]="marketing development"
role_recipients_custom[proxyadmin]="proxy-admin"
role_recipients_custom[sitemgr]="sites"

custom_sender()

The following is a sample custom_sender() function in health_alarm_notify.conf, to send an SMS via an imaginary HTTPS endpoint to the SMS gateway:

custom_sender() {
    # example human readable SMS
    local msg="${host} ${status_message}: ${alarm} ${raised_for}"

    # limit it to 160 characters and encode it for use in a URL
    urlencode "${msg:0:160}" >/dev/null; msg="${REPLY}"

    # a space separated list of the recipients to send alarms to
    to="${1}"

    for phone in ${to}; do
      httpcode=$(docurl -X POST \
            --data-urlencode "From=XXX" \
            --data-urlencode "To=${phone}" \
            --data-urlencode "Body=${msg}" \
            -u "${accountsid}:${accounttoken}" \
        https://domain.website.com/)

      if [ "${httpcode}" = "200" ]; then
        info "sent custom notification ${msg} to ${phone}"
        sent=$((sent + 1))
      else
        error "failed to send custom notification ${msg} to ${phone} with HTTP error code ${httpcode}."
      fi
    done
}

The supported variables that you can use for the function's msg variable are:

Variable name	Description
${alarm}	Like "name = value units"
${status_message}	Like "needs attention", "recovered", "is critical"
${severity}	Like "Escalated to CRITICAL", "Recovered from WARNING"
${raised_for}	Like "(alarm was raised for 10 minutes)"
${host}	The host generated this event
${url_host}	Same as ${host} but URL encoded
${unique_id}	The unique id of this event
${alarm_id}	The unique id of the alarm that generated this event
${event_id}	The incremental id of the event, for this alarm id
${when}	The timestamp this event occurred
${name}	The name of the alarm, as given in netdata health.d entries
${url_name}	Same as ${name} but URL encoded
${chart}	The name of the chart (type.id)
${url_chart}	Same as ${chart} but URL encoded
${status}	The current status : REMOVED, UNINITIALIZED, UNDEFINED, CLEAR, WARNING, CRITICAL
${old_status}	The previous status: REMOVED, UNINITIALIZED, UNDEFINED, CLEAR, WARNING, CRITICAL
${value}	The current value of the alarm
${old_value}	The previous value of the alarm
${src}	The line number and file the alarm has been configured
${duration}	The duration in seconds of the previous alarm state
${duration_txt}	Same as ${duration} for humans
${non_clear_duration}	The total duration in seconds this is/was non-clear
${non_clear_duration_txt}	Same as ${non_clear_duration} for humans
${units}	The units of the value
${info}	A short description of the alarm
${value_string}	Friendly value (with units)
${old_value_string}	Friendly old value (with units)
${image}	The URL of an image to represent the status of the alarm
${color}	A color in AABBCC format for the alarm
${goto_url}	The URL the user can click to see the netdata dashboard
${calc_expression}	The expression evaluated to provide the value for the alarm
${calc_param_values}	The value of the variables in the evaluated expression
${total_warnings}	The total number of alarms in WARNING state on the host
${total_critical}	The total number of alarms in CRITICAL state on the host

Examples

Basic Configuration

#------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# custom notifications

SEND_CUSTOM="YES"
DEFAULT_RECIPIENT_CUSTOM=""

# The custom_sender() is a custom function to do whatever you need to do
custom_sender() {
    # example human readable SMS
    local msg="${host} ${status_message}: ${alarm} ${raised_for}"

    # limit it to 160 characters and encode it for use in a URL
    urlencode "${msg:0:160}" >/dev/null; msg="${REPLY}"

    # a space separated list of the recipients to send alarms to
    to="${1}"

    for phone in ${to}; do
      httpcode=$(docurl -X POST \
            --data-urlencode "From=XXX" \
            --data-urlencode "To=${phone}" \
            --data-urlencode "Body=${msg}" \
            -u "${accountsid}:${accounttoken}" \
        https://domain.website.com/)

      if [ "${httpcode}" = "200" ]; then
        info "sent custom notification ${msg} to ${phone}"
        sent=$((sent + 1))
      else
        error "failed to send custom notification ${msg} to ${phone} with HTTP error code ${httpcode}."
      fi
    done
}

Troubleshooting

Test Notification

You can run the following command by hand, to test alerts configuration:

# become user netdata
sudo su -s /bin/bash netdata

# enable debugging info on the console
export NETDATA_ALARM_NOTIFY_DEBUG=1

# send test alarms to sysadmin
/usr/libexec/netdata/plugins.d/alarm-notify.sh test

# send test alarms to any role
/usr/libexec/netdata/plugins.d/alarm-notify.sh test "ROLE"

Note that this will test all alert mechanisms for the selected role.