Executing script or binary for alarm notification

[evilaedmin]

Hello,

Does VeeamONE support executing a script or binary in place of email for alarm notifications? We use an operations service where the most effective way of sending alarms is posting to their HTTP API.

[HannesK]

Hello,
yes. you can use the "actions" on each alarm to run a script



Best regards,
Hannes

[evilaedmin]

Hi Hannes,

Thanks for showing this! I believe I was thinking of vCenter Alarm Actions when I asked, where the script is executed and has access to environment variables which define the alarm, so for example we can send a HTTP POST event to our Notification service with a binary and the binary can reference the alarm information (vCenter Alarms) by use of environment variables.

Looking at the remediation actions documentation, no such similar functionality exists in VeeamOne?

[HannesK]

Hello,
I'm not sure what the question is. Is it about passing variables to a script? If yes, which one do you want to pass?

What I show above in the screenshot is "(remediation) actions". There are some pre-defined remediation actions e.g. for "Latest snapshot age" alarm which has "delete snapshot". But you can also use a script instead of the pre-defined "delete snapshot" and "delete all snapshots".

Best regards,
Hannes

[Shestakov]

Hi Eugene,
Here is a description of Veeam ONE remediation actions.
Which alarms resolutions would you like to automate? We may think of the new predefined remediation actions.

[ChrisGundry]

FYI - You can also do actions/run scripts in the notification section. We do this to trigger a script that generates speech from the text of the alarm. This alerts us to certain more critical alerts so emails are not missed. Notification actions don't do anything to the alarm on the dashboard, where if you run a script in the actions section then it sets the alarm as acknowledged, which is not what we wanted in our case.

[Shestakov]

Good input, Chris.
We probably should made an option to turn the alarm into "acknowledge" state or not.
Thanks for the feedback.

[ChrisGundry]

Thanks.

I would like to see that option as well, would give us some more flexibility to perform an action automatically but if the action didn't fix the problem then the alert would remain on our 'dashboard' so that people could check it and resolve manually.

[Shestakov]

That's how predefined actions work.
Once remediation action started, the alarm goes to "acknowledged" state. If action leads to issue resolution, alarm goes to "resolved" state, if action fails, back to warning/error.
Starting from upcoming release, all approvals and actions will be listed under Tasks&Events tab.

[ChrisGundry]

Can you explain what you meant by your comment then?

We probably should made an option to turn the alarm into "acknowledge" state or not.

In the case of snapshot auto removal action that the alarm stayed in acknowledged state, it didn't revert 'resolved' when the auto action took place. We left it for an hour or so and it didn't revert to resolved, so we right clicked the acknowledged alarm and clicked resolve and it stayed resolved.

As a result we tend not to use acknowledged status and don't have it show on our 'dashboards', we only show error and warning alarm status. We tend to work fast and if something is showing as an error/warning we resolve it, then it goes away. So we don't use acknowledged at all. It would be nice to use it for what we assume is it's intended purpose (to show someone that it is a known issue and maybe someone is working on it), but the actions and acknowledged issue mentioned above made is decide to avoid it and auto actions completely for clarity.

[Shestakov]

That comment applied to custom actions, scripts written by users.

As you mentioned if script executes through "notifications" tab, the alarm doesn't change its status, however if script is started from "Actions" tab, alarm turns to "Acknowledged" state. The thing is "Actions" tab with predefined actions appeared in the latest product version, while "Notifications" tab is an old thing. Currently there is an functionality overlap that you can run scripts from both tabs.

Our plans is to move scripts from "Notifications" to "Actions" completely. But since the behavior is different and some users, like you justly prefer scripts not to turn alarms into "acknowledge" state, we should add a checkbox to "Actions" tab for custom scripts to specify whether user wants alarm to change state once custom script is executed.

[ChrisGundry]

I see what you are saying. Yes, if that was going to change we would certainly want the ability to not acknowledge the alarm when applying a notification type action. We actaully like having the ability to do a notification action and then a resolve action if needed separately.