Alert notifications

When an alert changes state, it sends out notifications. Each alert rule can have multiple notifications. In order to add a notification to an alert rule you first need to add and configure a notification channel (can be email, PagerDuty, or other integration).

This is done from the Notification channels page.

Note: Alerting is only available in DranSCADA v4.0 and above.

1. In the DranSCADA side bar, hover your cursor over the Alerting (bell) icon and then click Notification channels.
2. Click Add channel.
3. Fill out the fields or select options described below.

• Name - Enter a name for this channel. It will be displayed when users add notifications to alert rules.
• Type - Select the channel type. Refer to the List of supported notifiers for details.
• Default (send on all alerts) - When selected, this option sends a notification on this channel for all alert rules.
• Include Image - See Enable images in notifications for details.
• Disable Resolve Message - When selected, this option disables the resolve message [OK] that is sent when the alerting state returns to false.
• Send reminders - When this option is checked additional notifications (reminders) will be sent for triggered alerts. You can specify how often reminders should be sent using number of seconds (s), minutes (m) or hours (h), for example 30s, 3m, 5m or 1h.

Important: Alert reminders are sent after rules are evaluated. Therefore a reminder can never be sent more frequently than a configured alert rule evaluation interval.

These examples show how often and when reminders are sent for a triggered alert.

To enable email notifications you have to set up SMTP settings in the DranSCADA config. Email notifications will upload an image of the alert graph to an external image destination if available or fallback to attaching the image to the email. Be aware that if you use the local image storage email servers and clients might not be able to access the image.

Note: Template variables are not supported in email alerts.

To set up Slack, you need to configure an incoming Slack webhook URL. You can follow Sending messages using Incoming Webhooks on how to do that. If you want to include screenshots of the firing alerts in the Slack messages you have to configure either the external image destination in DranSCADA or a bot integration via Slack Apps. Follow Slack’s guide to set up a bot integration and use the token provided, which starts with “xoxb”.

If you are using the token for a slack bot, then you have to invite the bot to the channel you want to send notifications and add the channel to the recipient field.

To set up PagerDuty, all you have to do is to provide an integration key.

Note: The tags Severity, Class, Group, dedup_key, and Component have special meaning in the Pagerduty Common Event Format - PD-CEF. If an alert panel defines these tag keys, then they are transposed to the root of the event sent to Pagerduty. This means they will be available within the Pagerduty UI and Filtering tools. A Severity tag set on an alert overrides the global Severity set on the notification channel if it’s a valid level.

Using Message In Details will change the structure of the custom_details field in the PagerDuty Event. This might break custom event rules in your PagerDuty rules if you rely on the fields in payload.custom_details. Move any existing rules using custom_details.myMetric to custom_details.queries.myMetric. This behavior will become the default in a future version of DranSCADA.

Using dedup_key tag will override DranSCADA generated dedup_key with a custom key.

The webhook notification is a simple way to send information about a state change over HTTP to a custom endpoint. Using this notification you could integrate DranSCADA into a system of your choosing.

Example json body:

{
  "dashboardId":1,
  "evalMatches":[
    {
      "value":1,
      "metric":"Count",
      "tags":{}
    }
  ],
  "imageUrl":"https://dranscada.com/assets/img/blog/mixed_styles.png",
  "message":"Notification Message",
  "orgId":1,
  "panelId":2,
  "ruleId":1,
  "ruleName":"Panel Title alert",
  "ruleUrl":"http://localhost:3000/d/hZ7BuVbWz/test-dashboard?fullscreen\u0026edit\u0026tab=alert\u0026panelId=2\u0026orgId=1",
  "state":"alerting",
  "tags":{
    "tag name":"tag value"
  },
  "title":"[Alerting] Panel Title alert"
}

• state - The possible values for alert state are: ok, paused, alerting, pending, no_data.

Notifications can be sent to a Kafka topic from DranSCADA using the Kafka REST Proxy. There are a couple of configuration options which need to be set up in DranSCADA UI under Kafka Settings:

1. Kafka REST Proxy endpoint.

2. Kafka Topic.

Once these two properties are set, you can send the alerts to Kafka for further processing or throttling.

Notifications can be sent by setting up an incoming webhook in Google Hangouts chat. For more information about configuring a webhook, refer to webhooks.

Squadcast helps you get alerted via Phone call, SMS, Email and Push notifications and lets you take actions on those alerts. DranSCADA notifications can be sent to Squadcast via a simple incoming webhook. Refer the official Squadcast support documentation for configuring these webhooks.

DranSCADA can render the panel associated with the alert rule as a PNG image and include that in the notification. Read more about the requirements and how to configure image rendering.

You must configure an external image storage provider in order to receive images in alert notifications. If your notification channel requires that the image be publicly accessible (e.g. Slack, PagerDuty), configure a provider which uploads the image to a remote image store like Amazon S3, Webdav, Google Cloud Storage, or Azure Blob Storage. Otherwise, the local provider can be used to serve the image directly from DranSCADA.

Notification services which need public image access are marked as ‘external only’.

All alert notifications contain a link back to the triggered alert in the DranSCADA instance. This URL is based on the domain setting in DranSCADA.