Alerting and contacts

How does alerting and contacts work ?

Contacts

Monitors send alerts to contacts. Contacts are managed from the account screen.

A default email contact is created at the account creation, new contact can be created by selecting the type and clicking the Add button.
To modify an existing contact simply click on it.

You can Edit the contact but also see where it is in use. Deleting a contact will delete all monitors using it !

Contacts types

Their is 3 types of contacts:

• Email address
• WEB url
• SMS (not yet available)

Email Address

This is the most common way to alert people. To avoid abuse recipient must accept the invitation. Invitation can be sent to the recipient using the invite link. A contact cannot be used until it has been verified.

The email template can be customized to meet your need or to integrate with a helpdesk management application.
This is not required, you can let all the fields empty.
The sender if customized must be an existing contact. The subject and the body of the email can use variables related to the alert.

WEB url

This kind of contact is used to communicate with another application like another monitoring or helpdesk system. Variables can be used to customize the URL.

Variables

• ${monitor_id}The number of the monitor.
• ${domain_id}The number of the domain.
• ${service_id}The number of the service_id.
• ${domain}The name of the domain.
• ${service}The name of the service
• ${status}The status in 'O', 'E' for Ok, Error.
• ${failures}The number of failure or 0 if not available.
• ${test}1 or 0 depending if this is a test or not.
• ${reminder}1 or 0 depending if this is a reminder or not.
• ${status_name}An human friendly status: 'UP' meaning Ok, 'DOWN' for Error.
• ${last_success}The date of the last success.

Alerts

Alerts can be sent on request for testing purpose from inside the monitor screen.
Normal alert is sent when the status of a service change. When status change to OK an alert is sent immediately. If the service fail then the system wait until the grace period or until the number of allowed failures stored in the monitor is exhausted.
If no monitor are monitoring the service, no alerts will be sent.
Reminders can be sent at regular interval until the service goes back to OK.
No alert or reminder will be send when the service or the monitor is disabled.