Keeping tabs on the health of your network is an important aspect of managing an enterprise scale digital signage deployment. The Revel Digital CMS provides monitoring capabilities for a range of device health metrics including CPU, memory, disk, and network utilization along with other valuable metrics including connected displays, volume level, clock drift and more.
Alert Rules
The monitoring is driven by alert rules which define which metrics to watch along with their associated value thresholds. An example of this would be CPU usage where the alert should only activate when CPU utilization is above 90%. In this case the metric would be CPU usage and the value threshold would be 90. Any number of individual metrics can be combined into a logical set of conditions.
An alert rule also defines which devices to monitor, which users to notify when an alert is activated, and other options for alert activation threshold and the check interval.
Create an alert rule
Alerts rules are found in Account Information under the Alert Rules tab. Click 'New Alert Rule' to create a new rule.
The alert rule details page contains the following fields:
Devices to monitor
Select which devices are to be monitored.
Alert Conditions
Any number of conditions can be grouped in a logical set of conditions using 'OR' and 'AND' groupings. Click the '+or' and/or the '+and' in order to add a new condition to the respective grouping.
Notification
Select which users are to receive an alert notification. Users must also have email and/or SMS alerting enabled. This can be configured in the user details page.
Trigger Threshold
Trigger threshold determines the percentage of players in alert state necessary to trigger the alert. By default it only takes one player to trigger the alert. However, if a threshold is set it would require a certain percentage of players, say 50%, in order to trigger the alert.
Periodicity
This setting determines how often the alert rule should be checked. Using a longer period will include more devices in a single alert. Shorter periods are helpful for getting notified sooner, however you may get a higher volume of alerts.
Alerts
Active alert rules will generate an alert when the alert rule conditions have been met. Alerts are listed in the Alerts section of the CMS.
When a new alert is triggered it will display in the list as Active. Active alerts will remain active and will continually be updated until resolved. Once active, any new triggers for an existing alert will update the Updated On timestamp. Any new devices included in the alerts will also be included in the update.
To view the alert rule responsible for triggering the alert, click the button in the Alert Rule column. To view the devices associated with an alert, click the button in the Affected Devices column.
The alerts table included the following information:
Status
Status can be one of the following:
- Active - An alert is active when triggered by alert rule and has not been either resolved or snoozed.
- Snoozed - Setting an alert to snooze will prevent any new updates to an existing alert.
- Resolved - By resolving an alert you are indicating the root cause of the alert has been addressed and you expect no new triggers on the associated alert rule. Once resolved, the alert may reoccur if the issues still persists and the associated alert rule is again triggered.
Alert Rule
This column contains a link to the alert rule associated with the alert.
Created On
The timestamp for when the alert was initially created.
Updated On
An alert that is still active will be updated anytime it's associated alert rule is triggered. This indicates the last time the alert rule was triggered.
Affected Devices
This column contains a link to the devices included in the alert.
Resolved On
The timestamp indicating when the alert was resolved.
Snoozed Until
Snoozing will effectively disable the alert until the specified date. The date can be set/reset at any time.
Alert Notifications
Email / SMS
New alerts will generate an email and/or an SMS message including the alert details. Notifications will only be sent to users assigned to the alert rule AND have either email or SMS messaging enabled in their user profile.
Webhook Notifications
A webhook is a URL which accepts data from another service. In our case you can provide a webhook which accepts the alert notification data when an alert is created, updated, or resolved.
An example use case for this functionality would be using Zapier to trigger an automation when an alert is generated. Zapier is a powerful tool for creating automation workflows for virtually any scenario. An example would be sending a message to a Slack channel when an alert is generated.
To configured, simply provide your webhook URL in the alert rule configuration. Revel Digital will send a POST request to your URL with the following payload.
{ "type": "active", "id": "XXXXXXX", "name": "webhook", "created": "2024-07-11T17:16:45.213Z", "updated": "2024-07-11T18:14:54.6846Z", "resolved": null, "devices": [ "XXXXXXX", "XXXXXXX" ] }
Fields include:
- type: 'active' or 'resolved'
- id: unique identifier for this alert
- name: name of the alert rule which triggered the alert
- created: timestamp of when the alert was first triggered
- updated: timestamp for when the alert was last triggered
- resolved: timestamp for when the alert was resolved
- devices: list of unique identifiers associated with this alert. These are compatible with the public API
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