Acknolwedgments via Smartphone?

[gshearer]

Hi All,

I'm replacing an aging Whats Up system with Zabbix at a company. Engineers are alerted via email to their blackberry devices (and SMS if need be). They click on a URL thats provided in the alert, which acknowledges the page, documents that xyz user acknowledged the page, and stops escalations.

How are you all doing acknowledgements if you're at a movie? or otherwise away from a computer? I can't be the only Zabbix user out there alerts engineers who use blackberry devices.

Thanks!

[cbidwell]

I agree. I have the same issue. It seems I don't get a lot of responses about this issue, or if an event is acknowledged to trigger an email that it's acknowledged so that people know that someone is working on it. I haven't heard anything as of yet.

[gshearer]

Workflow

Basically, the the workflow this company would like for me to create is as follows:

1. Trigger based on XYZ criteria
2. Alert to appropriate group of engineer(s)
3. Engineer xyz acknowledges the alert via blackberry .. preferably by some URL that was provided in the alert itself that he can just click on.
4. Within the Zabbix system it's documented somewhere that engineer XYZ ACK'd the alert at whatever time he clicked on that URL.
5. Everyone who has received an alert so far gets a final message that says "Engineer XYZ acknowledged the alert"
6. Escalations / Further alerts stop.

I have all of that working wonderfully with Zabbix.. except being able to do the ACK from their phone.

I'm so strapped for time right now that I don't imagine having time to throw together a PHP to ZABBIX API web page to allow this.. but if someone doesn't do it, I'll eventually get around to it.

[cbidwell]

How did you set up this part?

4. Within the Zabbix system it's documented somewhere that engineer XYZ ACK'd the alert at whatever time he clicked on that URL.
5. Everyone who has received an alert so far gets a final message that says "Engineer XYZ acknowledged the alert"

[gshearer]

Sorry, my bad.

I don't have #5 working YET.. but I saw some posts on the forum about someone else working on that, so I assumed it was possible.

As far as #4, thats already built into Zabbix.. YOu can look at the history for an event and see a list of acknowledgements.

[cbidwell]

Gotcha. Yeah #4 wasn't so difficult, but I have yet to figure out how to get #5 to work! The documentation is very sparse in this area and there isn't a lot on how to set this portion of it up. If you get this part working would you please chime in and let me know how? Thanks!

[gshearer]

Will do.. Strapped for time this week, but hopefully sometime next week!

[danrog]

I've created a public web page (part of a growing mobile zabbix site I'm creating) that uses the API from an older 1.7 dev release (this is because they removed the acknowledgement function in the events class for some reason in later releases [still not back in the latest SVN]). I haven't had any issues using it so far (been using it since I first saw this API function in 1.7 dev) but I don't know what the long term affects could be if you upgrade but continue using this older API class. I would have posted this to the wiki (or the forum) sooner but because the API call I'm using is not supported (yet), I've been hesitant to do so (plus, I'm not done with the site yet and I don't like releasing half done projects).

Basically, we add the following URL to all pages:

Mob: http://z.domain.com/mob/emob.php?triggerid={TRIGGER.ID}

The page, attached here, uses the Farley's PHP API Class (search for it on the forum). The link above takes you directly to the page attached, where you can enter a message and ack the trigger. The idea, when its complete, is to make all of the previous acknowledgements available for all to see on this public mobile site (which is designed for android based phones and iphones, haven't tested on BBerries yet but it should work just fine).

#5 is an interesting idea. I can think of a few ways to do it, however, getting the group email (or list of emails) an alert was sent too might be difficult without doing some custom SQL queries.

[ncramer]

Updated API function for acknowledge

Good stuff guys.

In my current version (1.8.1) I located a new, but undocumented, acknowledge function in the api code.

To implement I used danrog's code below, but replaced triggerid with eventid throughout, and specifically updated the API call with the new parameter typing:

$events[] = array('eventid'=>$eventid);

ZabbixAPI::query('event','acknowledge',array('even ts'=>$events, 'message'=>$message))

Obviously volatility of this functionality is to be expected, so don't bank on it remaining unchanged.

Cheers,
nc

[gshearer]

How are you identifying what user acknowledged the event?

Won't your APIUser always be the one who ACK's via this emob.php ?

-G

[gshearer]

Thanks to danrog and ncramer, this is the script I have working on Zabbix 1.8.2 and CentOS. Had to install json stuff on CentOS, and get Farley's Zabbix API setup first.

Attach you'll find the php script I point everyone to.

In each Zabbix Action, I send this URL out in the message:

http://myserver/zabbix/bback.php?eventid={EVENT.ID}

I only consider this a interim solution. I am hoping that the ZABBIX devs will get some sort of functionality like this in the core interface.

This system does not do any authentication. It has no idea who acknowledges a page. That is functionality that I need, and I'd also like to send a subsequent alert to everyone who has so far received an alert for a given event that it has been ACK'd and by who.

[danrog]

No problem gshearer. I had problems with the 1.7 dev branch when I used eventids instead of triggerids and just never revisited it since. Have you seen issues using eventid? I remember seeing some strangeness with triggers not getting ack'd and they just continued to page out when I used eventids.

I also opted to not use authentication but agree it is a major downside with this approach. Right now we rely on the engineer to put their initials in the message so we can go back to them if needed (plus it would be too painful to try and get them to login from their cell phone when they get paged in the middle of the night).

[gshearer]

Danrog, same here. I've asked Engineers to include their username or initials when ACK'ing via their phones.

I've not noticed any issues using eventid so far, seems to be pretty reliable for me!

-G

[timdau]

Impractical or not

It may not be practical for you, depending on how you set up your actions. But if you had a different action for each user you could point each of them to a URL with their username hardcoded:

http://myserver/zabbix/bback.php?eventid={EVENT.ID}&userid=tjones

[reallove]

Hi,
Thanks everyone for the contributions on this topic. Really what I was looking for !
Regarding timdau's last reply, this does not work for me...