Alert Management & Notifications

Cockpit monitor rules check the health of your servers and VMs in real-time, automatically triggering warning messages to administrators if something goes wrong.

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How Alerts Work 🚨

💡 Analogy: Car Dashboard Warning Lights

Think of Cockpit's alert system like the sensors and dashboard symbols in a modern car:

1. Detection (Sensors): Cockpit's background checker acts like temperature and tire pressure sensors, constantly reading physical metrics (CPU load, temperature, disk usage) and VM statuses.
2. Evaluation (Threshold Rules): The car's computer checks if a reading is unsafe. For example: "If the CPU stays above 90% for more than 5 minutes, trigger a warning."
3. Dispatch (The Dashboard Chime): The system decides how to warn you. It turns on a dashboard light or sends an alarm (sends an email alert to the sysadmin or triggers an network alert).

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Alarm Severity Levels

Alerts are color-coded into four severity levels to help you prioritize issues:

• Info (🟢 Green / Informational): Standard updates showing that things are working as expected (e.g., a backup finished successfully, or database sync is complete).
• Warning (🟡 Yellow / Warning): Non-critical events that you should review soon (e.g., a hard disk is 85% full, or a server is responding slightly slower than usual).
• Critical (🔴 Red / Critical): Serious problems that need immediate attention (e.g., a physical host disconnected, or a virtual machine crashed).
• Fatal (💥 Dark Red / Fatal): Major system failures that cause total outages (e.g., a storage pool went offline, or a server lost power).

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Setting Up Notifications

You can configure Cockpit to send alerts to your team using Email (SMTP) or Network Traps (SNMP).

1. Email Notifications (SMTP)

To have Cockpit email you when a warning triggers:

1. Log into Cockpit as an administrator.
2. Go to Settings > Notifications > Email.
3. Fill in your company's mail server details:
   • SMTP Host: The address of your mail server (e.g., smtp.corp.awan.io).
   • Port: Usually 587 (secure TLS) or 465 (SSL).
   • Authentication: The username and password of the sender email account.
   • Sender Address: The email address the alerts will appear to come from (e.g., alerts-noreply@corp.awan.io).
4. Set up Recipient Rules to choose who gets notified for each level of alert (e.g., send Warnings to the helpdesk, but send Critical/Fatal alerts to the system administrators' mobile alerts).

2. Network Alerts (SNMP Traps)

If your company uses a central network monitoring dashboard (an NMS like Zabbix or PRTG) to watch all office hardware:

1. Go to Settings > Notifications > SNMP.
2. Define where to send the alerts (the SNMP Target):
   • Target Host: The IP address of your monitoring server.
   • Port: Usually 162 (the standard SNMP trap port).
   • Community String: A passcode to authorize the alert (usually public or a custom string).
   • SNMP Version: Choose v2c or v3 (which includes encryption).