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Notification types#

The notification type categorizes the notifications that you can configure. When you create a notification, you must specify one of the following Rackspace Monitoring notification types:

Notification Description
Email Alerts where the message is delivered to a specified address.
Webhook Industry-standard web hooks, where JSON is posted to a configurable URL.
PagerDuty An incident management system integrated with Rackspace Monitoring.
SMS Text alerts where the message is delivered to any phone number.
VictorOps An incident management system integrated with Rackspace Monitoring.

The following sections describe the attributes associated with each notification type and provide information about the notification type API operations available to retrieve notification type information.

Email notification type#

The email notification takes the following parameters:

Name Description Validation
address Email address to send notifications to
  • Email address

Webhook notification type#

The webhook notification takes the following parameters:

Name Description Validation
url An HTTP or HTTPS URL to POST to
  • URL

Example: Webhook notification POST to a specified URL with JSON Payload

{
   "event_id": "acOne:enOne:alOne:chOne:1326910500000:WARNING",
   "log_entry_id": "6da55310-4200-11e1-aaaf-cd4c8801b6b1",
   "details": {
       "target": null,
       "timestamp": 1326905540481,
       "metrics": {
           "tt_firstbyte": {
               "type": "I",
               "data": 2,
               "unit": "milliseconds"
           },
           "duration": {
               "type": "I",
               "data": 2,
               "unit": "milliseconds"
           },
           "bytes": {
               "type": "i",
               "data": 17,
               "unit": "bytes"
           },
           "tt_connect": {
               "type": "I",
               "data": 0,
               "unit": "milliseconds"
           },
           "code": {
               "type": "s",
               "data": "200",
               "unit": "unknown"
           }
       },
       "state": "WARNING",
       "status": "warn.",
       "txn_id": "sometransaction",
       "collector_address_v4": "127.0.0.1",
       "collector_address_v6": null,
       "observations": [
           {
               "monitoring_zone_id": "mzOne",
               "state": "WARNING",
               "status": "warn.",
               "timestamp": 1326905540481,
               "collectorState": "UP"
           }
       ]
   },
   "entity": {
       "id": "enOne",
       "label": "entity one",
       "ip_addresses": {
           "default": "127.0.0.1"
       },
       "metadata": null,
       "managed": false,
       "uri": null,
       "agent_id": null,
       "created_at": 1326905540481,
       "updated_at": 1326905540481
   },
   "check": {
       "id": "chOne",
       "label": "ch a",
       "type": "remote.http",
       "details": {
           "url": "http://www.foo.com",
           "body": "b",
           "method": "GET",
           "follow_redirects": true,
           "include_body": false
       },
       "monitoring_zones_poll": [
           "mzOne"
       ],
       "timeout": 30,
       "period": 60,
       "target_alias": "default",
       "target_hostname": "",
       "target_resolver": "",
       "disabled": false,
       "metadata": null,
       "confd_name": null,
       "confd_hash": null,
       "active_suppressions": null,
       "scheduled_suppressions": null,
       "created_at": 1326905540481,
       "updated_at": 1326905540481
   },
   "alarm": {
       "id": "alOne",
       "label": "Alarm 1",
       "check_id": "chOne",
       "entity_id": "enOne",
       "criteria": "if (metric[\"t\"] >= 2.1) { return WARNING } return WARNING",
       "disabled": false,
       "notification_plan_id": "npOne",
       "metadata": null,
       "confd_name": null,
       "confd_hash": null,
       "active_suppressions": null,
       "scheduled_suppressions": null,
       "created_at": 1326905540481,
       "updated_at": 1326905540481
       },
       "tenant_id": "91111"
}

The following fields are contained within a single payload:

Field Description
eventID The ID for the event in the system.
logEntryID The ID for the log entry.
entity The entity record that triggered the alert.
check The check record that triggered the alert.
alarm The alarm record that triggered the alert.

The following fields will be populated in the request header when your webhook is called:

Header field Description
x-rackspace-webhook-token The webhook token defined in an account. This is used in your web application to verify that your webhook is called by an authorized Rackspace service.

PagerDuty notification type#

To use PagerDuty with Rackspace Monitoring, go to the PagerDuty website and sign up for an account. You will get an API Key in PagerDuty to be used when setting up the PagerDuty notification. To learn how to use this notification type, read the PagerDuty blog Rackspace Monitoring Now Integrates with PagerDuty.

Name Description Validation
service_key The PagerDuty service key to use
  • Alphanumeric string
  • String between 1 and 32 characters long
service_endpoint The PagerDuty service endpoint to use
  • URL
  • Optional

SMS notification type#

A notification sent by text to your phone, including international phone numbers; for example +15551234567. Standard text messaging rates charged by your phone service provider will apply.

Name Description Validation
phone_number Phone number to send the notification to, with leading + and country code (E.164 format)
  • String matching the regex //^+[0-9]{6,15}$//

VictorOps notification type#

A notification sent as a webhook to your VictorOps account.

To use VictorOps with Rackspace Monitoring, go to the VictorOps website and sign up for an account. You will get an API key and configure routing keys for the teams in VictorOps. The API key and routing key will be used when setting up the VictorOps notification. To learn more about this notification type, read the VictorOps blog Internet Age of Unix Philosophy and visit the VictorOps Knowledge Base.

Name Description Validation
routing key The optional VictorOps routing_key to use with Rackspace Monitoring. You create a routing_key in VictorOps for team on-call configuration. (/^[a-zA-Z0-9-_.]+$/)
api key The VictorOps api_key to use with Rackspace Monitoring. You get this when you sign up for a VictorOps account. UUID v4 format

Notification types API operations#

Use the following API operations to review information about notification types.

List notification types#

GET /notification_types

Lists available notification types.

This operation can be paginated. For information, see Paginated collections.

The following table shows the possible response codes for this operation:

Response Code Name Description
200 OK The request completed.
401 Unauthorized The system received a request from a user that is not authenticated.
403 Forbidden The system received a request that the user is not authorized to make.
500 Internal Server Error An unexpected condition was encountered.
503 Service Unavailable The system is experiencing heavy load or another system failure.

Request#

The following table shows the header parameters for the request:

Name Type Description
X-Auth-Token String (Required) A valid authentication token with administrative access. For details, see Get your credentials

Note

This operation does not accept a request body.

Response#

Example List notification types: JSON response

{
    "values": [
        {
            "id": "webhook",
            "fields": [
                {
                    "name": "url",
                    "description": "An HTTP or HTTPS URL to POST to",
                    "optional": false
                }
            ]
        },
        {
            "id": "email",
            "fields": [
                {
                    "name": "address",
                    "description": "Email address to send notifications to",
                    "optional": false
                }
            ]
        },
        {
            "id": "pagerduty",
            "fields": [
                {
                    "name": "service_key",
                    "description": "The PagerDuty service key to use.",
                    "optional": false
                }
            ]
        },
        {
            "id": "sms",
            "fields": [
                {
                    "name": "phone_number",
                    "description": "Phone number to send the notification to, with \
                                    leading + and country code (E.164 format)",
                    "optional": false
                }
            ]
        },
        {
            "id": "managed",
            "fields": null
        },
        {
            "id": "technicalContactsEmail",
            "fields": null
        },
        {
            "id": "atomHopper",
            "fields": [
                {
                    "name": "category",
                    "description": "A category by which to identify this notification.  \
                                    Categories will be prefixed by 'monitoring.alerts.',\
                                    so they will end up looking like: \
                                    'monitoring.alerts.USER_DEFINED_CATEGORY'", \
                                    "optional": false \
                }
            ]
        },
        {
            "id": "victorops",
            "fields": [
                {
                    "name": "api_key",
                    "description": "The VictorOps api key to use.",
                    "optional": false
                },
                {
                    "name": "routing_key",
                    "description": "The VictorOps routing key to use.",
                    "optional": false
                }
            ]
        }
    ],
    "metadata": {
        "count": 8,
        "limit": 50,
        "marker": null,
        "next_marker": null,
        "next_href": null
    }
}

Get a notification type by ID#

GET /notification_types/{notificationTypeId}

Returns information about the specified Notification type.

The following table shows the possible response codes for this operation:

Response Code Name Description
200 OK The request completed.
401 Unauthorized The system received a request from a user that is not authenticated.
403 Forbidden The system received a request that the user is not authorized to make.
500 Internal Server Error An unexpected condition was encountered.
503 Service Unavailable The system is experiencing heavy load or another system failure.

Request#

This table shows the header parameters for the request:

Name Type Description
X-Auth-Token String (Required) A valid authentication token with administrative access. For details, see Get your credentials

Note

This operation does not accept a request body.

Response#

Example Get notification type by ID: JSON response

{
    "id": "webhook",
    "fields": [
        {
            "name": "url",
            "description": "An HTTP or HTTPS URL to POST to",
            "optional": false
        }
    ]
}