Using Custom Poller Status in Email

Question

Hey Guys,

I'm fairly new to the alerting system and am trying to play around with including Custom Poller statuses in the body of an alert email. Specifically, the first email I'm trying to play with is triggered when one of our monitored UPSs goes on battery. I've had to alert working for a while but it currently only includes basic information like a hostname. Management would like more detail in the emails like the actual location of the UPS (set in the OID for sysLocation).

My question is, how do I embed the sysLocation (OID: 1.3.6.1.2.1.1.6) into my email alerts? I'm sure it's fairly easy, I just couldn't find any specific examples showing how.

Thanks in advance!

wifig0d · Answer

Yeah, I thought about using something similar, but it still seems like quite a bit of extra work that would still result in us (and our manager) getting the email alerts later rather than sooner.

I guess I'll just have to be patient and wait for 10.0 as I know this is one of the features they were working on.

byrona · Answer

Hrm, I see your plight. What if you were to forward the Trap as a Syslog and then alert on it from there? I haven't tried this but I can see that an alert option is to forward it to port 514 (syslog).

wifig0d · Answer

@byrona

I don't think the Node variables are available in Trap Alerts (I added the variable string to test, but won't be able to tell until a trap is actually sent).

The reason we're not using UnDP for this specific alert is that it refers to a UPS and we want to know IMMEDIATELY if a UPS goes on battery power. With the UnDP polling intervals (currently at 10 minutes as we have quite a number of devices), we could possibly miss a power loss or even worse, the battery itself could deplete before we even get an alert of a power issue.

I know they're planning on revamping the way Trap Alerts are handled with the upcoming version 10, but I'm not sure how far away that is. If anybody else has a recommendation on how we can attack these differently, please let me know.

Thanks!