The purpose of this article is to show how to configure notification in general and in a smoother way, so we will receive only the notification we want. Because sometimes we can receive too many notifications, and not all of them are relevant.

First of all, let’s explain what are those differents options we have to set notification :
 

Host notification
 

If we take the "generic-active-host-custom" host template as an example, we can see several parameters:

Notification options: These are the different types of host notifications you can receive.

Notification Interval: This is the time interval between 2 notifications if you want to be re-notified (this is also useful for escalations).
This is perhaps the most important parameter in terms of notification as it will clearly affect the number of notifications you will receive.

Notification Period: This is the period in which centreon-engine will be able to send a notification. It can be very different from the monitoring period. For example, we monitor resources 24 hours a day, 7 days a week but we only alert during working hours (except perhaps for certain critical services).

First notification delay: This parameter will allow you to add a little more delay before issuing the first notification (in addition to the checks that were done in SOFT state).
Again, this parameter must included/be a multiple of the normal check interval. This parameter allows you to avoid false positives for example.

Recovery notification delay: This is a parameter that allows you to wait before sending a recovery notification. Please note that this parameter is rarely used in production.

Service notification
 

If we take the “generic-active-service-custom” service template ans an example, parameters are the same as below except for this one :

Notification type: These are the different types of notifications of the services that it is possible to receive.

Now let’s take a concrete example where we activate notification for all supervised objects.

Enable notifications for Host

Go to configuration > hosts > templates > generic-active-host-custom

We need to set notifications on the generic-active-host-custom template like so :

Enable notifications for services

After that, we can configure notification on the generic-active-service-custom template, like so :

Select specific notifications

At this state configuration is almost done. The last thing we want to do is to choose what are the notifications we want to receive, directely in the user configuration Configuration  >  Users  >  Contacts / Users:

In this example, the user will be notified only for Recovery and Down host, Critial, Recovery and Flapping services, for all supervised objects.

Receiving notifications from a specific host

Now let’s say that we want to receive notifications from a specific host.

Instead of doing it like we did before (in generic-active-host-custom template), we can do it directly from host configuration: go to configuration>hosts>hosts choose the host you want, and go to the notification section :

Here is what we did :

• We selected a contact that will receive notification. We could have selected a contact group too.
• We chose to receive notification for the checked status

Note that, as we already configure the notification interval, delay, notification period, in the "generic-active-host-custom" template, we don’t have to do it here.

The parameters will be inherited from the template and it’s not necessary to define them again. Except if you want to override them.

Once the contact is set on the host, it will also notify for the services bound to this host.

User “admin” configuration : go to configuration > users select the contact 

In this case we linked a contact to a specific host. It means that the user “admin” will be notified only if the host is down, recovery or flapping.