Storage System User Alert
The Send User Generated Alert feature raises an alert by hand, through every alerting mechanism the Storage Grid has configured. Its two uses are:
- Verifying the Alert Manager. After entering SMTP settings, an ITSM webhook, or SNMP credentials, send an alert and confirm it arrives. This is the fastest end-to-end check that alerting actually works.
- Notifying administrators of something QuantaStor cannot detect -- an upcoming maintenance window, for example -- through the channels they already watch.
Navigation: Storage Management --> select a Storage System --> Alert Manager (toolbar) --> Generate Test Alert (button)
The Generate Test Alert button is available from every tab of the Alert Manager dialog.
Fields
- Message -- the alert text. This is the body that reaches every configured destination.
- Severity -- the level the alert is raised at: Critical, Error, Warning, or Info.
There are no other fields. In particular the alert goes to all configured destinations -- there is no per-alert recipient selection, no subject line, and no scheduling. Who receives it is determined by the Alert Manager's configured mechanisms and by each user's alert subscriptions, not by this dialog.
Notes
Save your settings first. Press OK or Apply on the Alert Manager dialog before sending a test alert. Unsaved SMTP or webhook settings are not used for the test, so a test sent against unsaved settings can fail for reasons that have nothing to do with the settings themselves.
Send the test at "Warning" or higher. QuantaStor deliberately does not forward Info level alerts to the ITSM webhook modules, so an Info level test will never reach Slack, PagerDuty, Teams and the like -- making a working integration look broken. Info level alerts are still delivered by email and recorded in the audit log.
The alert is real. It is delivered through live mechanisms and recorded in the audit log at /var/log/qs/qs_audit.log like any other alert. Sending one at Critical will page whoever is on call.
The same thing can be done from the CLI:
qs alert-raise --message="Scheduled maintenance window starting" --severity=warning
For the full alerting configuration see Alert Manager / Call-home Alerting.