Notifications
If you’ve configured notifications but feel like you haven’t received a notification you expected, here are some tips on what to look at.
Check the Notification Method Copied
A good place to start is the Notification Method itself. Have you received other notifications that use this notification method before? If you haven’t, take a quick look at the notification method settings to make sure it’s using a valid script. You can also usually test the notification script in the command line. For example:
Once you’ve confirmed that this is configured correctly and working as expected you can move on to the next check.
Check the Notification Profile Copied
The next place to look is the Notification Profile itself. Check to make sure you have the correct Hosts, statuses, Service Checks, Hashtags, and BSM notifications selected. Also, remember that the relationship between Hosts and Services is an AND relationship. For example, if you want to notify for a host group called Dallas Servers and a check called CPU on those Hosts you would select Dallas Servers AND the CPU check. Otherwise, if you were to just select the Hosts, you would only be notified if the host itself went down and not the service you expected to be notified on.
You should also make sure the notification method is properly assigned to the correct Contact and the Contact has any needed notification variables set. Finally, make sure the “Send from alert #” and “Stop after alert #” is configured as you would like.
Also, remember that there are “Shared Notification Profiles” and “Personal Notification Profiles”. Be sure you check whichever is relevant to your particular setup.
Check to make sure the Host triggered a notification Copied
There are times where you may think a notification should have been triggered, but due to configuration mistakes on a Host or Service Check a notification may never be sent. Always remember that an alert in itself won’t trigger a notification. You always need to make sure that you have your host and services configured to actually notify when they alert.
For a service take a look at the service check Advanced section within the Service Checks settings menu:
And for hosts look under the Notifications tab in the hosts settings menu.
A simple mistake here can lead to the lack of a notification ever being sent even though the Host or Service has alerted.
Finally, check the host itself in the monitoring menu to see if it did actually notify. Check both the History and Notifications tabs to see if an alert actually triggered a notification. In the example below you can see that many critical alerts occurred but yet there are no notifications.
This tells us that we need to go back and double check our configuration to make sure our notifications are in fact configured correctly.