HTML Notifications

Notifications

Notifications are part of every standard monitoring installation. But OMD makes it very easy to customize the layout of your email notifications by using templates.

By default, you will have the 2 standard notifications templates in your site folder at:

    OMD[site]:~$ ls -la etc/mail-templates/
    total 12
    drwxr-xr-x 1 site site  166 Mar 30 14:37 ./
    drwxr-xr-x 1 site site  754 Mar 26 14:21 ../
    -rw-r--r-- 1 site site  867 Jun 12  2014 notify-by-email.host.tpl
    -rw-r--r-- 1 site site  937 Jun 12  2014 notify-by-email.service.tpl

with the corresponding commands host-notify-by-email and service-notify-by-email defined in

    etc/nagios/conf.d/notification_commands.cfg

If you just want to change the default layout of your email notifications, just edit
the templates from the path above.

HTML E-Mail Notifications

Starting with OMD 2.20 the html mail commands and templates are included already and can directly be used by assigning the host- and service-notify-by-email-html commands.

In order to send HTML emails we need to add a template for html mails and create two
new commands. The changed parts are bold.

define command {
    command_name service-notify-by-email-html
    command_line /usr/bin/perl $USER1$/notify-by-email.pl \
        --template=$USER4$/etc/mail-templates/notify-by-email.service.html.tpl \
        --mail=/usr/sbin/sendmail \
        -o BASEURL="http://`hostname -f`/$USER3$/" \
        -o NOTIFICATIONTYPE='$NOTIFICATIONTYPE$' \
        -o NOTIFICATIONCOMMENT='$NOTIFICATIONCOMMENT$' \
        -o HOSTNAME='$HOSTNAME$' \
        -o HOSTALIAS='$HOSTALIAS$' \
        -o HOSTSTATE='$HOSTSTATE$' \
        -o CONTACTEMAIL='$CONTACTEMAIL$' \
        -o HOSTADDRESS='$HOSTADDRESS$' \
        -o SHORTDATETIME='$SHORTDATETIME$' \
        -o SERVICEDESC='$SERVICEDESC$' \
        -o SERVICESTATE='$SERVICESTATE$' \
        -o SERVICEOUTPUT='$SERVICEOUTPUT$' \
        -o LONGSERVICEOUTPUT='$LONGSERVICEOUTPUT$' \
        -o SERVICEPERFDATA='$SERVICEPERFDATA$' \
        -o ACKAUTHOR='$SERVICEACKAUTHOR$' \
        -o ACKCOMMENT='$SERVICEACKCOMMENT$' \
        -o DURATION='$SERVICEDURATION$' \
        -o SERVICEEVENTID='$SERVICEEVENTID$' \
        -o LASTSERVICEEVENTID='$LASTSERVICEEVENTID$'
}

It is important to use /usr/sbin/sendmail as mailer, otherwise you will get errors like

Ignoring header field "MIME-Version: 1.0".

Now do the same for the host command.

Last step is to configure your contacts to use the new html commands.

You can also download the prepared files:

cd ~/etc/mail-templates/ && wget https://labs.consol.de/omd/data/notify-by-email.host.html.tpl
cd ~/etc/mail-templates/ && wget https://labs.consol.de/omd/data/notify-by-email.service.html.tpl
cd ~/etc/nagios/conf.d   && wget https://labs.consol.de/omd/data/notification_commands_html.cfg

Troubleshooting

If it doesn’t work as expected, make sure you:

have /usr/sbin/sendmail installed
have configured the html commands for your contact

try to run the command manually:

  ./lib/nagios/plugins/notify-by-email.pl \
          --template=etc/mail-templates/notify-by-email.service.html.tpl \
          --mail=/usr/sbin/sendmail \
          --verbose \
          -o CONTACTEMAIL='your@email.com'

Of course you need to insert a valid email address.

Result

If everything worked, you should receive notifications in html format including
the pnp performance graphs.