syslog

Send notifications to Syslog using Netdata's Agent alert notification feature, which supports dozens of endpoints, user roles, and more.

Setup

Prerequisites

• A working logger command for this to work. This is the case on pretty much every Linux system in existence, and most BSD systems.
• Access to the terminal where Netdata Agent is running

Configuration

File

The configuration file name for this integration is health_alarm_notify.conf.

You can edit the configuration file using the edit-config script from the Netdata config directory.

cd /etc/netdata 2>/dev/null || cd /opt/netdata/etc/netdata
sudo ./edit-config health_alarm_notify.conf

Options

The following options can be defined for this notification

Config Options

Name	Description	Default	Required
SYSLOG_FACILITY	Set SYSLOG_FACILITY to the facility used for logging, by default this value is set to local6.		yes
DEFAULT_RECIPIENT_SYSLOG	Set DEFAULT_RECIPIENT_SYSLOG to the recipient you want the alert notifications to be sent to.		yes
SEND_SYSLOG	Set SEND_SYSLOG to YES, make sure you have everything else configured before turning this on.		yes

DEFAULT_RECIPIENT_SYSLOG

Targets are defined as follows:

[[facility.level][@host[:port]]/]prefix

prefix defines what the log messages are prefixed with. By default, all lines are prefixed with 'netdata'.

The facility and level are the standard syslog facility and level options, for more info on them see your local logger and syslog documentation. By default, Netdata will log to the local6 facility, with a log level dependent on the type of message (crit for CRITICAL, warning for WARNING, and info for everything else).

You can configure sending directly to remote log servers by specifying a host (and optionally a port). However, this has a somewhat high overhead, so it is much preferred to use your local syslog daemon to handle the forwarding of messages to remote systems (pretty much all of them allow at least simple forwarding, and most of the really popular ones support complex queueing and routing of messages to remote log servers).

You can define multiple recipients like this: daemon.notice@loghost:514/netdata daemon.notice@loghost2:514/netdata. All roles will default to this variable if left unconfigured.

SEND_SYSLOG

You can then have different recipients per role, by editing DEFAULT_RECIPIENT_SYSLOG with the recipient you want, in the following entries at the bottom of the same file:

role_recipients_syslog[sysadmin]="daemon.notice@loghost1:514/netdata"
role_recipients_syslog[domainadmin]="daemon.notice@loghost2:514/netdata"
role_recipients_syslog[dba]="daemon.notice@loghost3:514/netdata"
role_recipients_syslog[webmaster]="daemon.notice@loghost4:514/netdata"
role_recipients_syslog[proxyadmin]="daemon.notice@loghost5:514/netdata"
role_recipients_syslog[sitemgr]="daemon.notice@loghost6:514/netdata"

Examples

Basic Configuration

#------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# syslog notifications

SEND_SYSLOG="YES"
SYSLOG_FACILITY='local6'
DEFAULT_RECIPIENT_SYSLOG="daemon.notice@loghost6:514/netdata"

Troubleshooting

Test Notification

You can run the following command by hand, to test alerts configuration:

# become user netdata
sudo su -s /bin/bash netdata

# enable debugging info on the console
export NETDATA_ALARM_NOTIFY_DEBUG=1

# send test alarms to sysadmin
/usr/libexec/netdata/plugins.d/alarm-notify.sh test

# send test alarms to any role
/usr/libexec/netdata/plugins.d/alarm-notify.sh test "ROLE"

Note that this will test all alert mechanisms for the selected role.