Nagios XI - Notification Problems

Email Tests

Send a test email to see if the Nagios server can send email to an account by going to:

Configure->My Account Settings->Send Test Notifications.

Then, check to see if the test email arrives. If it doesn't arrive, the problem could be one of the following:

- Nagios server cannot send mail outside of your network (if you are using Sendmail)

- Also Nagios may not be able to relay mail through your company server (if you are using SMTP)

Outbound SMTP connections may be blocked by your border firewall. Lastly, unauthenticated SMTP relaying may be denied somewhere downstream - try switching email methods from Sendmail to SMTP in the admin section.

User's Notification Options

Check if Notifications are enabled globally - click on the "Monitoring Process" menu on the left from the Home page, and make sure you see a green dot next to the Notifications in the "Monitoring Engine Process" window. You can enable/disable Notifications by clicking on the "Action" button on the right hand side.

Check if Notifications are enabled for the user currently logged into Nagios XI - click on the username in the upper right corner next to "Logged in as: ...", then click on "Notification Preferences" under "Notification Options" from the left panel menu. Make sure that the "Enable Notifications" check-box is checked.

Review the selected Notification Types - the user will be notified only on host/service states, that are selected.

From the same page, click on "Notification Methods" and make sure a Notification Method is selected.

Host/Service Notification Options

Check if Notifications are enabled for a particular host/service. If you are having issues with Notifications for a particular Host or Service, log into the Core Config Manager and click on "Hosts" or "Services" under "Monitoring" from the left panel menu. Find your Host or Service and click on the "Modify" Action button to the right. Click on "Alert Settings" tab and verify that the "on" radio button next to the "Notification Enabled" is selected.

Make sure that the Check Period under the "Check Settings" tab is equal or larger than the Notification Period under the "Alert Settings" tab on the Host/Service Management page in the CCM. If Nagios is not checking a host or service during a specific time, then it will certainly not send notification during that time.

Check the "Alert Settings" tab under the Host/Service Management page in the CCM for two things:

- Make sure "Notification enabled" is not set to "off".

- See which options are selected under "Notification options", because this will determine the states of hosts/services that you will be notified for.

Note: If you are having issues with many hosts and services, you should check the templates you are using - "xiwizard_generic_host" and "xiwizard_generic_service" should be the first ones to be checked. Any changes you make in these templates will affect all hosts and services that reference them. You can override this by modifying the host or service configuration itself. If you need to know more on the topic, please read the full explanation of Nagios object inheritance here:

Documentation - Nagios Core - Object Inheritance

Contacts

The contact must be either directly associated with the host or service or be part of a contactgroup that is connected to the host or service.

Make sure users and contacts that were added within Nagios XI are set up with the proper notification handlers:

If you are using Users, which are also Contacts (you've added a Contact to them):
- xi_host_notification_handler and xi_service_notification_handler

If you are using Contacts only:
- notify-host-by-email and notify-service-by-email

Contacts and users are similar but not the same - read more about it here:

Documentation - Nagios XI - Users And Contacts

If you are not receiving notifications, it also possible that the nagiosadmin user was set to use the generic_template contact template, which resulted in notifications not being controlled through the XI interface. This can be corrected by changing the user's contact template to be xi_generic_template is the Core Config Manager. This bug was corrected in 2009R1.2 and only affects systems that had/have previous versions installed.

Contact Timeperiods

Each contact has a timeperiod management option that determines when they get notification. Closely review if there are any time exclusions set within contact's timeperiod. These are times that the user will not be sent notifications.

Acknowledgements and Scheduled Downtime

If the problem has been acknowledged or the host/service is in downtime, alerts won't be sent.

Testing From Host or Service (Sending Custom Notificaiton)

If you proceed to the host or service in question on the Nagios server and then select the Advanced tab, you can send a test email (custom notification) from the specific host or service that you are testing.

Tracking Notifications

If you go to Home->Incident Management->Notifications you should see that Nagios is sending notification based on the settings you have chosen and to the appropriate contacts. Using this tool helps you track down if Nagios intends to notify the appropriate contact.

Test Emails Fail, "Invalid address" Error

We identified a bug in some earlier versions where test emails to addresses like "root@localhost" or "user@xiserver" will fail to send because they fail email address validation.

The email address needs to have some sort of domain at the end of it to pass validation and send. The browser may falsely display a success message for Users testing from their "Send Test Notification" page, while the browser will get an error message if a user runs the test from the Admin->Manage Email Settings->Send A Test Email page.

This bug was fixed in will be fixed in XI 2011R2.0 however if you are experiencing this problem, make sure users have the Nagios XI Sending Address in the Admin->Manage Email Settings page set to an email address with a FDQN OR the address listed below will also work:

Nagios XI <root@localhost.localdomain>

Make sure initial setup for the Admin->Manage Email Settings page has been done and that you've pressed Update on the email settings.

This bug can be identified by a debug message showing up at the top of the test email page that says "Invalid address:".

This bug is specific to installations using version of PHP 5.2+.

Watch The Logs

The following command can be used to watch the logs related to events and notifications in XI:

tail -f /usr/local/nagiosxi/var/eventman.log

Final Thoughts

For any support related questions please visit the Nagios Support Forums at:

http://support.nagios.com/forum/