Contact is used to identify someone who should be contacted in the event of a problem. You should create entries for all people who should receive alerts then assign them to the corresponding Contact groups if needed. You can have a Contact assigned to more than one Contact group too.
How to create Contact ?
To create new Contact, go to “APM | Configure | Administration | Notifications | Contact” then click on the “Add” button.
Then define a name for your Contact, the time period during which the contact can be notified about host problems, the time period during which the contact can be notified about service problems, the host states (Host options) for which notifications can be sent out to this contact, the service states (Service options) for which notifications can be sent out to this contact, the commands used to notify the contact of a host problem, and the commands used to notify the contact of a service problem.
The other parameters are optional for the contact to be created but are needed and must be defined for the contact to work correctly.
To save time in the creation of a new Contact, you can copy/clone the default “admin” Contact and then change parameters to fit those required for the new contact. In this way, you can avoid possible errors during configuration for the new contact.
The Host and Service command fields are special because they handle many commands that can be selected, but only two of them apply for the context of Host or Service command.
These two commands for the “Host command” field are:
- notify-host-by-email
- notify-host-by-email-html
The difference between them is that “notify-host-by-email” will send plaintext alerts when a host is in a problem state whereas “notify-host-by-email-html” will send the alert in HTML format.
These two commands for the “Service command” field are:
- notify-service-by-email
- notify-service-by-email-html
The difference between them is that “notify-service-by-email” will send plaintext alerts when a service is in a problem state whereas “notify-service-by-email-html” will send alerts in HTML format.
Note: It is important not to mix notification commands that apply to hosts with those that apply to services. You can see the difference in their name. For example, (notify-host-by-email) applies to a host because we see the description host in the name of the command. The same applies to service (notify-service-by- email).
