Variables/Parameters in text-based email notifications

fop

Hello all,

After many years as an Orion/SWOSH admin I've dropped headfirst into the SaaS world and am trying to create like for like when it comes to host metric alerts, which may not be the IDEAL way of going about it but users hate receiving a JSON payload in a text email :)

In SWOSH you have SWQL statements and built-in macros for things like hostname, alert time, alert name etc. Nicely formatted text or HTML emails. For SaaS these are Parameters, things like

{{icon}}, {{severity}}, {{priority}}

These are fine, I can put these in emails and they resolve to the correct info. A more difficult thing seems to be Entities for anomaly alerts because they are blocks like:

{{#entities}}
{
"name": "{{displayName}}",
"timestamp": "{{timestamp}}",
"entityUrl": "{{{entityUrl}}}"
}
{{^last}},{{/last}}
{{/entities}}

Documentation on these seems to be non-existent because it's assumed you're notifying another service like Teams, Slack, SNOW etc via a JSON payload.

Anyone dipped their toes into this yet?

fop

Never mind, I got there in the end, but it's very restrictive. The parameters are actually the Solarwinds implementation of the Handlebars.js template engine, but utilise more of the backend which is Mustache.

Introduction | Handlebars

Unfortunately, because Solarwinds uses the Mustache backend there is no logic possible in the alert payload, so it's expected that your target application will take a JSON (or whatever) payload and filter out the bones to get just the info it needs. This means that my HTML email template is more detailed than I'd like, and Tags are an absolute necessity. Perhaps in future we'll be able to add helper functions to Handlebars.

<p><strong>{{severity}}</strong>alert from Solarwinds Observability, priority {{priority}}.</p>
<p>Thefollowing entities have been marked as down for the last 30 minutes:</p>
<p>{{#entities}}<ahref="{{{entityUrl}}}"target="_blank">{{displayName}}</a>,  time logged: {{timestamp}}<br />
Tags: <br/><table>{{#entityTags}}<tr><td>{{key}}</td><td>{{value}}</td></tr>{{/entityTags}}</table>
<br/>{{/entities}}</p>

The {{#entities}}{{/entities}} parameter pair will iterate through all entities associated with the alert, then within that is {{#entityTags}}{{/entityTags}} iterates through all the tags assigned to the node, so I used that iteration to build up a table of tags.