Thomas Segismont
February 6, 2015 at 7:17 AM
Hi,

I've been thinking about the alert notification system lately.

What's the information needed to send a notification?
How to convert the information into text when a human is the recipient?
How to configure the system?
How to make it fit into the Hawkular suite?

1. Contextual data

A notification has contextual data. Contextual data is comprised of:
- alert definition data
- data involved in the trigger (for example metrics and availability values)
Many times there are symptoms of a problem that are seen through alerts.  If there are many alerts happening around the same trigger time, should we be adding pointers to other potentially related alerts to help users diagnose the root cause faster?

2. Notifier data

2.1 Who is the recipient?

Email: address
SMS: phone number

Sometimes the recipient is fixed (for example when sending email to a
mailing-list).
Sometimes it should be picked from user information (for example when
sending emails to a group of users)

This information depends on the alert definition, but a default should
be configurable for convenience.
Are we considering alert escalation?  Setting up a list that the alerts go to by default, and then if they are not resolved by some configurable SLA, they are then sent to another group of people to raise the awareness of the problem?

2.2 How should the message be sent?

Email: SMTP address/port and credentials
SMS: Web service HTTP URL and credentials

The information depends on the tenant (in rare cases, on the alert
definition, but let's ignore the problem for now)

3. How should the message be formatted?

When a human is the recipient, information can be turned into text with
a template engine (like freemarker).

Information depends on the alert definition, but a default should be
configurable for convenience.
Can we do full HTML format (maybe txt vs. HTML configurable).  It would be nice to add links directly into the web console for that resource that alerted so users can very quickly click through to investigate the problem.

4. Configuration

Notifiers may expose REST endpoints (with standardized URIs)

- default config: /emailnotifier/configuration

- alert definition level config: /emailnotifier/configuration/1

Example:

{
"to": ["paul@foobar.com", "alfred@foobar.com"],
"cc": ["backoffice-mw-ops@foobar.com"],
"subject": "Pool soon exhausted",
"mode": "plaintext+html"
"templates":
[{
name: "plaintext",
uri: "/emailnotifier/configuration/1/templates/plaintext"
},{
name: "html",
uri: "/emailnotifier/configuration/1/templates/html"
}]
}

- template configs:

Example:

/emailnotifier/configuration/1/templates/plaintext
/emailnotifier/configuration/1/templates/html


I'm still not sure which component should be responsible of loading user
information when a user (or a group of users) is selected as the recipient.

5. Process

- Alerts sends contextual data on the bus
- Notifier picks it up
- Notifier loads configuration for this alert definition or the default one
- Notifier applies the template (optional)
- Notifier sends email or invoke sender API

6. Storage

There needs to be some shared storage where to bind configuration and
templates to alert definitions.


Comments?

Regards,
Thomas
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Catherine Robson
User Experience Design
Red Hat JBoss Middleware
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