Mail Alerter extension (Tips & tricks)

by acaballero , Friday, November 13, 2015, 18:34 (3297 days ago)
edited by acaballero, Friday, November 13, 2015, 19:30

The Mail Alerter extension is a simple plugin that sends emails when nodes get a "warning" or "critical" state.

Requirements

• You must be running the WASP distro. The PhpDock distro doesn't support extensions.
  
• You need to have a registered license. This extension isn't included in the free extensions bundle.
  
• You must make sure that you can make outbound SMTP connections from your network.

Installation

• Close SMTPing.
  
• Download the extension installer from the downloads page.
  
• Execute the installer.

Configuration

After installing the extension, you'll notice two icons on the sidebar:

• The first icon starts/stops mail alerts.
  
• The second icon (with the gear) invokes the configuration dialog.

When hitting the configuration icon, the dialog will pop up and allow you to enter all details needed to work.

Basic settings

First you need to specify if you're going to use a local server (thus, you have an SMTP daemon with unrestricted access from localhost) or an SMTP Gateway.

The de facto setting you should use is the second: an external server. You'll have to provide the hostname, TCP port, user name, password and encryption type.

If you're going to use TLS or SSL, you must make sure that:

• The remote host has a valid, non-self-signed SSL certificate.
  
• Your network can open outbound connections to the TCP port you set.
  
• The remote host can receive connections from your network.

Also you need to specify the sender email in the "Send mail as" field.

Additional settings

You can send a test email using the "Testing account" field to see if emails are being relayed. Just specify an email address and hit the "Send test e-mail" button.

The "Root" account is the email address that will receive notifications. If you want specific groups to send emails to a different email address, you could do it afterwards.

The Mail Delivery Triggers define the behavior of the extension listener.

• The Group Flag is "Warning" when a few nodes are alerted and "Critical" when all nodes are alerted. This can be defined specifically from the group editor.
  
• For starters, you could set the trigger to 10 consecutive failures. Feel free to set a number that works for you.
  
• Specify twice the amount of consecutive failures to receive notifications, unless you want to get bothered by the mailer

A recommended setting for triggering alerts could be: 3 failures and notify every 10 minutes.

Per Group alerts

When you edit a group, you'll be able to specify an email recipient other than the "root" one specified on the extension configuration. You can set a different recipient for every group on the dashboard, and those groups with no recipient defined will be notified to the "root" account.