About

LibreNMS includes a highly customizable alerting system.
The system requires a set of user-defined rules to evaluate the situation of each device, port, service or any other entity.

This document only covers the usage of it. See the DEVELOPMENT.md for code-documentation.

Rules

Rules are defined using a logical language.
The GUI provides a simple way of creating basic as well as complex Rules in a self-describing manner.
More complex rules can be written manually.

Rules must consist of at least 3 elements: An Entity, a Condition and a Value.
Rules can contain braces and Glues.
Entities are provided as %-Noted pair of Table and Field. For Example: %ports.ifOperStatus.
Conditions can be any of:

Equals =
Not Equals !=
Matches ~
Not Matches !~
Greater >
Greater or Equal >=
Smaller <
Smaller or Equal <=

Values can be Entities or any single-quoted data.
Glues can be either && for AND or || for OR.

Note: The difference between Equals and Matches (and it's negation) is that Equals does a strict comparison and Matches allows the usage of the placeholder *. The placeholder * is comparable with .* in RegExp.

Examples

Alert when:

Device goes down: %devices.status != '1'
Any port changes: %ports.ifOperStatus != 'up'
Root-directory gets too full: %storage.storage_descr = '/' && %storage.storage_perc >= '75'
Any storage gets fuller than the 'warning': %storage.storage_perc >= %storage_perc_warn

Templates

Templates can be assigned to a single or a group of rules.
They can contain any kind of text.
The template-parser understands if and foreach controls and replaces certain placeholders with information gathered about the alert.

Syntax

Controls:

if-else (Else can be omitted):
{if %placeholder == 'value'}Some Text{else}Other Text{/if}
foreach-loop:
{foreach %placeholder}Key: %key<br/>Value: %value{/foreach}

Limitations: Currently it is not possible to have nested if controls, so if inside an if. It is also not possible to have an if inside a foreach control. These limitations are going to be resolved in (near?) future.

Placeholders:

Hostname of the Device: %hostname
Title for the Alert: %title
Time Elapsed, Only available on recovery (%state == 0): %elapsed
Alert-ID: %id
Unique-ID: %uid
Faults, Only available on alert (%state == 1), must be iterated in a foreach: %faults
State: %state
Severity: %severity
Rule: %rule
Timestamp: %timestamp
Contacts, must be iterated in a foreach, %key holds email and %value holds name: %contacts

Examples

Default Template:

%title\r\n
Severity: %severity\r\n
{if %state == 0}Time elapsed: %elapsed\r\n{/if}
Timestamp: %timestamp\r\n
Unique-ID: %uid\r\n
Rule: %rule\r\n
{if %faults}Faults:\r\n
{foreach %faults}  #%key: %value\r\n{/foreach}{/if}
Alert sent to: {foreach %contacts}%value <%key> {/foreach}

Transports

Transports are located within $config['install_dir']/includes/alerts/transports.*.php and defined as well as configured via $config['alert']['transports']['Example'] = 'Some Options'.

Contacts will be gathered automatically and passed to the configured transports.
The contacts will always include the SysContact defined in the Device's SNMP configuration and also every LibreNMS-User that has at least read-permissions on the entity that is to be alerted.
At the moment LibreNMS only supports Port or Device permissions.
To include users that have Global-Read or Administrator permissions it is required to add these additions to the config.php respectively:

$config['alert']['globals'] = true; //Include Global-Read into alert-contacts
$config['alert']['admins']  = true; //Include Adminstrators into alert-contacts

E-Mail

E-Mail transport is enabled with adding the following to your config.php:

$config['alert']['transports']['mail'] = true;

The E-Mail transports uses the same email-configuration like the rest of LibreNMS.
As a small reminder, here is it's configuration directives including defaults:

$config['email_backend']              = 'mail';               // Mail backend. Allowed: "mail" (PHP's built-in), "sendmail", "smtp".
$config['email_from']                 = NULL;                 // Mail from. Default: "ProjectName" <projectid@`hostname`>
$config['email_user']                 = $config['project_id'];
$config['email_sendmail_path']        = '/usr/sbin/sendmail'; // The location of the sendmail program.
$config['email_smtp_host']            = 'localhost';          // Outgoing SMTP server name.
$config['email_smtp_port']            = 25;                   // The port to connect.
$config['email_smtp_timeout']         = 10;                   // SMTP connection timeout in seconds.
$config['email_smtp_secure']          = NULL;                 // Enable encryption. Use 'tls' or 'ssl'
$config['email_smtp_auth']            = FALSE;                // Whether or not to use SMTP authentication.
$config['email_smtp_username']        = NULL;                 // SMTP username.
$config['email_smtp_password']        = NULL;                 // Password for SMTP authentication.

API

API transports definitions are a bit more complex than the E-Mail configuration.
The basis for configuration is $config['alert']['transports']['api'][METHOD] where METHOD can be get,post or put.
This basis has to contain an array with URLs of each API to call.
The URL can have the same placeholders as defined in the Template-Syntax.
If the METHOD is get, all placeholders will be URL-Encoded.
The API transport uses cURL to call the APIs, therefore you might need to install php5-curl or similar in order to make it work.
Note: it is highly recommended to define own Templates when you want to use the API transport. The default template might exceed URL-length for GET requests and therefore cause all sorts of errors.

Example:

$config['alert']['transports']['api']['get'][] = "https://api.thirdparti.es/issue?apikey=abcdefg&subject=%title";

Nagios Compatible

The nagios transport will feed a FIFO at the defined location with the same format that nagios would.
This allows you to use other Alerting-Systems to work with LibreNMS, for example Flapjack.

$config['alert']['transports']['nagios'] = "/path/to/my.fifo"; //Flapjack expects it to be at '/var/cache/nagios3/event_stream.fifo'

IRC

The IRC transports only works together with the LibreNMS IRC-Bot.
Configuration of the LibreNMS IRC-Bot is described here.

$config['alert']['transports']['irc'] = true;

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