David's picture

I'm checking out the new Observium appliance and was hoping to get some guidance on how to configure the email settings so i am able to receive alert emails. 

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance.

Forum: 
Jeremy Davis's picture

So if it's not working OOTB, then there are 2 possibilities OTTOMH:

  • There is a bug in the TKL appliance - although TBH I'm not convinced of that, but stranger things have happened! :)
  • Your server/IP has been blacklisted and any mail is being blocked. This is a common issue with internet connections that have dynamic IPs. It can also happen with hosting companies (often have dodgey users that are sending spam, then you get allocated their old IP when they get kicked...)
David's picture

The appliance has been working quite well on our network besides the email portion which we could never get functioning.

Anyone have success with this aspect yet?

Jeremy Davis's picture

Thanks for the heads up Chris
David's picture

I was hoping the new release would have a fix, but that doesn't appear to be the case.

 

Maybe the next release will...

Jeremy Davis's picture

It sounds like many TurnKey Observium users are hanging out for this feature are looking forward to it being re-added...! :)

David's picture

The alerts only work with the subscription version. I set my contacts up in the config.php file.

Jeremy Davis's picture

As noted (even in the post directly above yours) that the email alerts does not work in the community version.
Jeremy Davis's picture

As noted a number of times previously in this thread, Observium Community Edition doesn't currently support email notifications.

If you have purchased the subscription version of Observium, I suggest you check their documentation and/or contact their support mailing list.

Jeremy Davis's picture

Thanks so much for the correction Adam. I really appreciate that!

And apologise on the state of our website too, it's in desperate need of some love... :(

Yes, I know our release schedule leaves plenty of room for improvement too! :( We're working hard on fixing that, but as resourcing is one of our biggest hurdles. We have made some backend infrastructure tweaks which should (at least in theory) improve things. It means that we can update single appliances, rather than needing to update everything. So for projects such as yours with a stable release cycle, we're hoping to be able to keep things up to date a bit better.

But back to the issue at hand, all appliances have a local MTA configured (postfix). That allows users to use generic scripts/instructions to configure a remote SMTP relay.

Now that I'm aware that's back up and running, I'll make sure the next release includes email sending pre-configured and working!

Thanks again for the update.

Jeremy Davis's picture

Thanks tons for the pointers with that. We'll be sure to include that in out next release.

Unfortunately, there's nothing anyone external can do to help just now. We're currently in the process of upgrading the base OS to Debian Stretch (the last release was Jessie based) so almost everything else has ground to a halt.

We were already running way behind schedule when we started and unfortunately, we've hit way more issues that we anticipated. Whilst it's incredibly frustrating, there's been some very valuable lessons for us to learn along the way. We're concurrently trying to build in fixes for internal friction points as we go this time around.

That's been a double edged sword though, extending the dev time of this release, but hopefully improving the release cycle once we finally get v15.0 out the door.

So long story short, fingers crossed we should have the next release of the library, inc a v15.0 Observium appliance with your latest build (available at build time) within the next month or so. Although we'll have to see how that timeframe goes.

Moving on from that, once we have v15.0 released, then we should be able to simply rebuild everytime you put out a new version. The grand plan is to automate as much of this as we can. We'll still do the final testing manually, but the build and preliminary testing should all be automated where possible.

So one thing that would be incredibly useful (post v15.0 release) would be new Observium release notifications. I have previously looked to see if you had anything like that (i.e. release feed, or announcement mailing list), but I couldn't find anything quite like that!? Did I miss something?

PS I generally prefer to have these discussions publicly, so this is great. But if you ever want to get in touch directly/privately, please feel free to ping me via jeremy AT turnkeylinux.org.

Jeremy Davis's picture

Have you double checked the config as per what Adam posted above?

If you have, then it should "just work". If it's still not working, then it is possible that your port 25 is being blocked, or your IP address has been blacklisted. You should be able to work around both of these, either by enabling an SMTP relay in Postfix, or by configuring Observium to use a remote SMTP directly.

If your server isn't able to send emails, then I suggest configuring a system level Postfix SMTP relay is preferable, as then you'll also get system emails (such as notifications about TKLBAM issues and other system notices). If you are running v14.2 then you can do that within the Mail relay section of Confconsole. Or you can also configure it manually.

Alternatively, if you wish to just configure Observium itself, then please follow their docs on that config.

Jeremy Davis's picture

So unless my info is out of date, I'm pretty sure that's your issue with `./add_device.php 192.168.38.92`instead you'll need to have a DNS (or hosts file, etc) entry for your device first (which points to it's IP address).

As for the other issue, I recall seeing that somewhere along the line but I'm pretty sure, it was fixed for the newest TurnKey release (and sorry, I don't recall the cause).

Whilst you are right and the current TurnKey release has an out of date copy of Observium, you should be able to update it really easily as per the upstream Observium docs. As Adam notes, updating that shouldn't change how the MIBs operate.

If you want the best possible Observium experience, then it's probably worth upgrading to the subscription edition of Observium.

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