Integrating with Alert Notification

For more flexibility beyond the basic email forwarding of Cloud APM, you can integrate with the Alert Notification product to extend Cloud APM capabilities for notifying users when problems occur.

Integration with Alert Notification gives you granular control over who receives notifications and how they are received. For example, each user can decide whether they want to receive email, SMS, or voicemail. Notifications can also be routed to Slack. Different users can receive different types of notifications based on time of day, day of week, and so on. Each user can decide what types of alerts they want to receive. For example, a database administrator might want to receive only database alerts that are warning or higher severity.

Before you begin

You can subscribe to Alert Notification in Marketplace or IBM® Cloud. After you subscribe, you will receive an email that says your service is ready.
Note: You can Start Alert Notification by signing in to your subscription account in IBM Marketplace and go to Products and services.

About this task

As part of integrating with Alert Notification, you must configure Cloud APM to send events to Alert Notification. Then, you can create notification policies to determine the alerts for which you want to receive notifications.

You can add monitored applications to resource groups. For every saved resource group, you can configure one or several email addresses. When the performance of any managed system in a group exceeds a threshold, an email notification is sent to the addresses that are configured for the group.

Alert Notification sends email notification for any events that open on the managed systems that are assigned to the group.

Procedure

Complete Steps 1 - 2 one time for the Cloud APM deployment.

  1. In the Alert Notification UI, obtain the following information that you will use to configure Cloud APM to integrate with Alert Notification:
    Alert Notification API Endpoint
    URL associated with the Alert Notification API that is used to process alert notifications.

    To obtain the URL, open the Alert Notification UI and click Manage API Keys and the information icon. Copy the API URL that is shown and paste it into this field.

    Alert Notification API Key
    Key that is created in the Alert Notification UI. This API key is paired with the API password that is entered as part of this configuration parameter.

    To obtain the key for the Alert Notification API, see Managing API keys.

    Alert Notification API Password
    Password that is paired with the key that is entered as part of the Alert Notification API Key configuration parameter.

    To obtain the password for the Alert Notification API, see Managing API keys.

  2. In the APM Console, complete the following substeps to configure Cloud APM to integrate with Alert Notification:
    1. Click icon System Configuration > Advanced Configuration and select Event Manager.
    2. In the Event Manager Parameters list, complete the following Alert Notification fields:
      Alert Notification API Endpoint
      Add the API URL that you obtained in Step 1 to this field.
      Alert Notification API Key

      Add Alert Notification API key that you obtained in Step 1 to this field.

      Alert Notification API Password
      Add the password for the Alert Notification API that you obtained in Step 1 to this field.
      Alert Notification for ITMv6
      Set this value to True to enable Alert Notification for ITMv6 events. The default value is False.

Complete Steps 3 and 4 for any Resource Group for which you want to route alerts based on the resource group.

  1. If you want to route notifications based on resource groups, complete the following substeps:
    1. In the Cloud APM console, click System Configuration > Resource Group Manager.
    2. Select a resource group and click Edit to open the Resource Group Editor.
      Important: You must save a new or edited resource group before you open Alert Notification. After you save, the Resource Group Editor closes and you must reopen it if you want to continue to use it.

      If you do not save, after you configure email notification in Step 4 and return to the Resource Group Editor, you might receive an error message that informs you synchronous update is not allowed.

  2. Complete the following steps to configure email notification:
    1. In the APM console Resource Group Editor, click the Configure email notification URL to open the IBM Alert Notification application in a new browser tab or window.
      This action automatically creates a new policy based on the resource group you selected in Step 3.
    2. In Alert Notification, configure Users and Groups and associate their email addresses with resource groups for receiving event notifications by email.

      You can set up your own Alert Notification policies and notifications for the type of alerts that you want to receive. For example, a Linux Administrator might want to receive email, SMS messages, or voicemail for all Linux systems. Then, they might want to turn off high severity alerts that are critical. A policy allows them to filter all events that are generated by the Linux OS agent. For information about using the Notifications Editor in the Alert Notification application, see Creating notification policies.

What to do next

For more information about Alert Notification, see IBM Alert Notification Documentation.