Configuring Alerting Notification
System administrative users for InformixHQ must enable which alerting notification services the InformixHQ server should use when an alerting incident occurs. If desired, you can configure and enable multiple alerting notification services.
- Email
InformixHQ can be configured to send emails through an external SMTP server when alerting incidents occur. To enable email notifications, the system administrative user must provide a SMTP server and port to use. Optionally, you can provide a user and password for authenticating to that SMTP server and a from email address that InformixHQ should use when sending alerting notification emails.
Email notifications must first be enabled at the system level by the system administrative user. Then each individual InformixHQ user who wants email notifications must enable it for their email address on their My Settings->Alerting Configuration page.
- Twilio
InformixHQ can be configured to send alerting incidents through Twilio. To enable Twilio notifications, the system administrative user must provide the Twilio account SID, authorization token, and phone number to send alerts from.
Twilio notifications must be enabled at the system level by the system administrative user. Then each individual InformixHQ user who wants Twilio notifications must enable it for their phone number on their My Settings->Alerting Configuration page.
- Pager Duty
InformixHQ can be configured to send alerting incidents through Pager Duty. Pager Duty alerts are enabled globally by the system administrative user of InformixHQ. To enable Pager Duty notifications, the system administrative user must provide a PagerDuty service key.
Pager Duty alerts do not need to be enabled by each individual user of InformixHQ. When Pager Duty alerting notifications are enabled by the system administrative, all alerting incidents that occur in InformixHQ will be sent to the specified Pager Duty service key.
InformixHQ sends PagerDuty notifications through REST using Pager Duty’s Events API v1.
- Run Script
The InformixHQ server can be configured to run a local script whenever an alerting incident occurs. Script notifications in InformixHQ provide an extensible way to integrate InformixHQ's alerting with any alerting mechanism used by your organization.
Script notification is enabled globally by the system administrator on the System Settings > Alerting Configuration page. When script notification is enabled, the InformixHQ server will run the specified script whenever an alerting incident occurs on any server or group managed by InformixHQ.
Before the InformixHQ server runs your script, it will set the following environment variables to contain information about the alerting incident that occurred:- ALERT_ID – id of the alerting incident
- ALERT_TIMESTAMP – timestamp of the alerting incident
- ALERT_SUMMARY – summary text describing the alerting incident
- ALERT_MESSAGE – detailed message describing the alerting incident
- SERVER_ID – id of the Informix server on which the alerting incident occurred
- SERVER_ALIAS – alias of the Informix server on which the alerting incident occurred
- GROUP_ID – id of the parent group containing the Informix server on which the alerting incident occurred
- GROUP_NAME – name of the parent group containing the Informix server on which the alerting incident occurred
- EVENT_URL – an url link to view the alerting incident in InformixHQ
A sample use case for the “Run Script" alerting service would be, suppose your organization uses a third party alerting service that InformixHQ does not have native support for. That service requires you to POST a JSON document to a specific URL to generate an alert. You can write a script that reads in the environment variables set by InformixHQ, reformat that data into a JSON document as required, and then use curl to send a REST POST request to your organization’s alerting service.