7.4. Notifications

In addition to viewing probe status within the RHN interface, you may be notified whenever a probe changes state. This is especially important when monitoring mission-critical production systems. For this reason, Red Hat recommends taking advantage of this feature.
To enable probe notifications within RHN, you must have identified a mail exchange server and mail domain during installation of your RHN Satellite Server and configured sendmail to properly handle incoming mail. Refer to the Installation chapter of the RHN Satellite Server Installation Guide for details.

7.4.1. Creating Notification Methods

Notifications are sent via a notification method, an email or pager address associated with a specific RHN user. Although the address is tied to a particular user account, it may serve multiple administrators through an alias or mailing list. Each user account can contain multiple notification methods. To create a notification method:
  1. Log into the RHN website as either an Organization Administrator or Monitoring Administrator.
  2. Navigate to the User Details ⇒ Notification Methods tab and click create new method.
  3. Enter an intuitive, descriptive label for the method name, such as DBA day email, and provide the correct email or pager address. Remember, the labels for all notification methods are available in a single list during probe creation, so they should be unique to your organization.
  4. Select the checkbox if you desire abbreviated messages to be sent to the pager. This shorter format contains only the probe state, system hostname, probe name, time of message, and Send ID. The standard, longer format displays additional message headers, system and probe details, and instructions for response.
  5. When finished, click Create Method. The new method shows up in the User Details ⇒ Notification Methods tab and the Notification page under the top Monitoring category. Click its name to edit or delete it.
  6. While adding probes, select the Probe Notifications checkbox and select the new notification method from the resulting pulldown menu. Notification methods assigned to probes cannot be deleted until they are dis-associated from the probe.