So a few years ago I started this thread (Including Charts in Alert Emails ) and I see people are still trying to fighting with things in an attempt to get charts in alerting emails.
Therefore, I propose the ability to include charts within the body of alerting emails and other formats that support graphical elements.
As a lot of the Charts are interactive on the GUI it would most likely be best if the emailed charts were images instead of any HTML5 or JS based content.
I can see this happening in potentially two different manners:
- A URL based setup similar to how the images are currently generated, except instead of the URL containing chart related elements, it only references the alert in question.
- When the Alert is triggered an image is dynamically generated and stored for a given time period. This image can then be included inline with the email.
There are pros and cons for both of those for example, security, compatibility etc. But They are just two possibilities from the top of my head.
By allowing the addition of these charts into email alerts it provides a quick snapshot of what is going on without the need to login to NPM/SAM etc.
For example, if I'm alerting on interfaces that have hit 95%+ utilization for over 10 minutes. I can chose to include a chart showing utilization over the past 7 days. Allowing me to quickly see if the interface sometimes peaks at a particular time time of day (for example everyone going on their lunch break and getting youtube happy) or if this is an abnormal event and needing further investigation.
To give a more graphical example, an email could be structured as follows (don't have a chart with bad response times currently so use your imagination and pretend there is a huge spike)
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Subject:
ALERT - SomeSW1 Response Time Has Exceeded Threshold
Body:
Node: SomeSW1 (Click to View Node)
Alert: Response Time Exceeded
Date: 20/05/2019
Time: 9:11AM
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