Zabbix Email Notifications
This section is part of Zabbix & Elrond Guide
Zabbix Server comes by default with some channels to send alerts like email, Discord, Slack, sms and others.
On Zabbix they are called Media types and you can look at them in menu top-left Administration—> Media types.
You can always add Media types with the button “Create Media Type” top-right or with Import button.
SETTING UP MAIL SERVER
We need to fill all the SMTP configuration in order to allow our Zabbix Server to be able to send emails.
Click on the Email Media type to see the details like in this image:
If you want to use a Gmail account to send the emails you must fill the fields like here. Remember that on google the Username of SMTP connections is without @gmail.com (only the username).
You will be prompted in your gmail session (maybe on your phone) to allow third party applications to use non secure connections. Need to say yes and allow it.
You can use google to search about SMTP configuration settings for other mail providers like Outlook.com.
When you are in the Administration —> Media types list, in left of every row you can see a Test link, now it’s time to you check if it works, click on it and look at your destination address inbox.
CONFIGURE ACTIONS
You must go to menu Configuration —> Actions. There you’ll see an action called “Report problems to Zabbix administrators”. Click to edit it. It must be enabled and be sure that Operations tab looks like this:
ENABLE EMAIL ALERTS IN YOUR USER
Now we need to go to Administration—>Users to edit our user, in this case called “Admin”. Click on it to edit the user rules.
In the tab Media you must click on link “Add” and select Email Media Type. You will need to fill your receiving email account. And remember always on these kind of screens to click “Update”, very usual on Zabbix.
What we do here at The Palm Tree Network is, we created ourselves an Outlook.com account just for alerts. In our case because we didn’t had outlook accounts before. Now with our new alerts exclusive account we have setup our outlook.com App in the phones with custom notification settings, like different sounds and priority for notifications in the phone.
You can customize too the “Use if severity” field, it means above what level you want to get notified.
NOW TRY A TRUE ALERT
In your user, be sure that you select to be alerted by Email at least in Average Severity.
Go to your host (Configuration—>Hosts), triggers and search for the name “agent” in the search bar:
This is the trigger that we’ll activate. Go to your dashboard (Monitoring —> Dashboard) and look into Problems panel, it must be empty at the moment.
Now open your ssh session to the Host (where you have the zabbix agent running and your nodes). And write:
sudo systemctl stop zabbix-agent
And wait, in your dashboard you should see the problem agent not available blinking. It lasts about 4 minutes because it’s setup this way. Now you must have received an email alerting you. Start again the service with:
sudo systemctl start zabbix-agent