Use cases for notifications

Hello and welcome to this video about use cases for notifications within PRTG. As my first example I would like to cover push notifications. To receive push notifications on your smartphone or tablet first install the PRTG app on your phone and configure it to connect to your PRTG server. Then in the app, activate push notifications. The app will request a token from the Google or Apple cloud and will then send this unique Token to your PRTG server. A new entry for your phone will then appear in the notification contacts on your server.

Your PRTG server can now send push notifications to your mobile device whenever your server detects an event that has a push notification assigned to it. To be able to receive push notifications both your RPTG server and your smartphone must have internet access. For both the registration process and sending the push notifications. Let us now look at another use case. This time for notification schedules. For example: If you have a green IT program that includes a scheduled shutdown of your servers, then you do not want to receive alarms from PRTG about these schedule shutdowns.

To avoid receiving alarms you can set the schedule for each notification. For example if your printers are shut down over night then the notifications you use for your printers should specify a schedule that is only active during the day. To specify a schedule go into the notification and here under schedule select one that is active for the time you want. For example from eight to eight during the day. The list of schedules that appears here is set one centrally under setup account settings and schedules. Another use case is custom notifications. PRTG offers you the ability to define your own customized notifications so you can tailor them to meet your needs. For example: Using PRTGs restful API you can add it internal PRTG objects to automatically knowledge an alarm for example or to automatically pause a sensor. To do this you select HTTP action as the type of notification and enter the API call. As a concrete example let us look at this notification which is an HTTP post that automatically acknowledges an alarm.

It is an execute HTTP action. And here as the URL we have an API call to my demo PRTG server. I am now going to apply this notification to one of my sensors. Here under notifications for the sensor we see that we have a stage trigger when the sensor is down that will use this HTTP post notification. Let us now see what happens when we put this sensor into a down state. We see the sensor first go into warning. And then into error. Which will trigger our notification. And our notification then automatically acknowledges the error.

Another possibility for custom notifications is to run a program or script as the notification. You can use this to document issues, to reboot systems, to collect additional information for debugging, plus anything else you can think of. Essentially if you can write your script to perform the action, then you can use this action as a notification. If you would like to use API calls for custom notifications it is important to note that our entire API documentation is available inside PRTG itself. Under setup PRTG API. You can use any scripting language that you like. From Batch scripts to Python to run a script on your PRTG system. A common question from our users is how to send SMS notifications, using a GSM-Modem or cellphone. This type of notification is particularly interesting as a backup notification method, for when your IP connection or internet connection is down. To send SMS over a GSM-Modem you need a third party software tool to send the SMS. If you would like a list of some third party software that we have already tested and configuration guides for those products. Please check out our Knowledge-Base article number 393. To trigger the SMS software you then use either an HTTP action notification or an execute program notification. That brings me to the end of this video. If you have any questions about notifications or anything else in PRTG please contact us at any time under [email protected].

Thanks and Good bye.