Notifications in AutoPatcher

This section describes how to configure notifications for your patching. Notifications are configured in patching groups. Each group may have several notification channels configured (e.g. slack, email, pager duty). This way one notification can be sent to several slack channels and teams, or pager duty accounts, or emails.

Creating notification group

First, create the notification group - https://autopatcher.nordcloudapp.com/notification_groups

Notification events

AutoPatcher sends notification about the following events:

All finish notifications contain execution status (machine update status, hook result etc.).

An incoming_patching notification is sent by default 1 hour before the actual patching is started. However your can change this time amount by setting upcoming_notification_time field in your plan to a custom value in hours.

Notifications about dry run plans and events

AutoPatcher adds a [DRY RUN] tag to the end of a title of every notification when plan or event is configured to scan for available patches. Example:

Notification channels

Slack

AutoPatcher can send the notifications to the slack channel. Every notification contains IDs and the links to the related objects so you can easily check its details.

Example notifications:

Pager Duty

AutoPatcher sends all the notifications to the Pager Duty service. Based on these notifications you can create a rule to generate an error alert in the PagerDuty configuration. Pager Duty example to generate an alert only on errors:

Email

AutoPatcher can send notifications to configured email. Example:

Customer-friendly emails

For some types of events there's a possibility to send emails in different format which is more customer-friendly. For now the new format is defined only for the following types of events:

• incoming_patching
• patching_start
• patching_finish

To use the new format you should check the Is external checkbox when creating email notification:

Below are examples of customer-friendly emails:

Using CLI

Adding notification group:

nc-autopatcher-cli create notification_group --file notify.json

notify.json example:

{
    name: "test-group",
    owner: "TEST",
    notifications: [
        {
            channel: "test-channel",
            type: "slack",
            web_hook_url: "webhookurl"
        },
        {
            type: "email",
            email: "x@y.com"
        },
        {
            type: "email",
            email_config: {
                address: "z@w.com",
                is_external: true
            }
        },
        {
            type: "pager duty",
            routing_key: "ct3h84ytc382ty947t4t7243y98bvt2y3vt",
            override_settings: true,
            levels: [],
            events: []
        }
    ],
    events: [],
    levels: []
}

• type - notification type: "slack","email", "pager duty"
• web_hook_url - slack web hook url
• channel - slack channel routing_key - Pager Duty key
• events - nofify about specified events. If events array is empty AP sends all notifications
• levels - notify about specified severity levels. If levels array is empty AP sends all notifications.

You can override Notification group filters (events & levels) by adding override_settings: true parameter and providing new settings in the channel configuration. The full list of the events and severity levels can be found in the Notification events section.

Adding notification groups to a plan

Add the created notification group into the schedule plan. You can add multiple groups:

nc-autopatcher-cli update plan --file plan.json --id $PLAN_ID

plan.json example:

{
  "cron_window_start": "0 19 * * *",
  "cron_window_end": "0 20 * * *",
  "machines": [
    {
      "id": "XXX",
      "order": 4
    },
    {
      "id": "YYY",
      "order": 3
    }
  ],
  "name": "TEST_PROD_ACCOUNT",
  "owner": "nordcloud",
  "parallel": 1,
  "notification_groups": [
     "34vc5-23v6fc-2v3c65-2c34",
     "GROUP2"
  ]
}