Werk #1395: Event Console can now create notifications via Check_MK RBN
| Component | Event Console | ||||||||||||||||||
| Title | Event Console can now create notifications via Check_MK RBN | ||||||||||||||||||
| Date | Sep 3, 2014 | ||||||||||||||||||
| Level | Prominent Change | ||||||||||||||||||
| Class | New Feature | ||||||||||||||||||
| Compatibility | Compatible - no manual interaction needed | ||||||||||||||||||
| Checkmk versions & editions |
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The Event Console has now the new builtin action Send monitoring notification that can be used in all three situations where actions are possible:
- When an event is being opened
- When an event is being cancelled
- By a user executing an action on an open event
This new action creates a monitoring notification just as the ones that happen, when in normal (non-EC) monitoring a service goes from OK to CRIT or vice versa. This notification is being process by the rule based notifications and is handled just like a monitoring notification.
Why whould you want to do that?
- You can use the same notification plugins for alarms triggered by the monitoring and by the Event Console. No need for an extra SMS script in the Event Console.
- You can use all of the flexiblity of existing notification plugins - including configuring their parameters via WATO.
- All notifications from your Check_MK environment are now controlled by a common set of notification rule. For example if a user wants to disable all of his notifications then there is just one place for doing that.
There is nothing you need to setup. Just check the action Send monitoring notification in your event rules and that's it.
Note: Because events are not exactly the same as services and because of the nature of distributed monitoring there are a few specialities in notifications that come from the Event Console:
- EC notifications have only limited information about the host. There is no information about host tags or WATO folders. Do not use matching criteria on those or otherwise that match will always fail.
- EC notifications currently have no information about contacts or groups of a host. This would need an online Livestatus query, but that would fail if the host is being monitored by a remote system.
- EC notifications do not have a previous host or service state, since the Event Console is a stateless monitoring. Do not set any matching criteria on the event type since none of these can be fulfilled currently.
- All EC notifications are sent as service notifications. The name of the event's application is taken as service description.
The notification rules have got a new matching option especially for EC notifications: Event Console alerts. Here you can make a notification rule deal only with EC notifications or exclude just those. You can also match on EC specific fields like the event's rule id, syslog priority, syslog facility and event comment.
Most of the event's special fields are available as notification context variables - to be used in custom notification scripts or template definitions. Please use the standard debugging methods for displaying all variables. At least defined are EC_ID, EC_RULE_ID, EC_PRIORITY, EC_FACILITY, EC_PHASE, EC_COMMENT, EC_OWNER, EC_PID, EC_MATCH_GROUPS, and EC_CONTACT_GROUPS.