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Create New Notification Object

Using the Notification Wizard, you can configure EventMeister to alert you visually, email you, make a log entry, update an RSS feed and carry out external actions when certain new entries are received by your feeds.

1. To invoke the Notification Wizard:
   

   Select 'Notifications > New Notification...' from the main menu.
   

   OR
   

   Click on the 'Add..' button in the Notification Manager.
   

   OR
   

   Click on the 'New Notification' toolbar button.
   

   OR
   

   Use the keyboard shortcut ALT + N + N

Step 1: Name the Notification Object

1. Enter a unique name for the notification object in the 'Name' text box
2. Check the 'Enable' checkbox if you want the notification to be enabled on completion of the wizard.

Step 2: Select Feeds to be Watche

1. Select the feeds that you want the new notification object to apply to. If you want it to watch multiple feeds you must choose feeds that have matching fields.

Please note that the 'Select All' and 'Select None' buttons apply to items within the selected group only.

Step 3: Define Notification Criteria

1. Define Sensitivity of Notification Criteria
2. Adding a Notification Criteria Rule
3. Disabling / Enabling a Notification Criteria Rule
4. Operators
5. Precedence / Grouping Filter Rules
6. Reordering Filter Rules
7. Editing a Rule
8. Deleting a Rule
9. More Complex Rules - Regular Expressions
10. Examples

Define Sensitivity of Notification Criteria (Optional)

By default EventMeister will raise a notification every time a notification rule is matched, but you can fine-tune this behavior if you wish. For example you can:

Set the notification to fire only if a cluster of matching items occur within a certain time period
Set the notification to fire only if certain items are NOT seen within a certain time period
The latter can be useful if a service indicates a healthy state by generating regular "I'm alive" events. If you set a notification to fire if no such events are seen for a while, you'll be alerted when something is wrong with the service.

The sensitivity settings are at the top of the screen:

To enable the sensitivity options, tick "Only fire if", choose one of the options from the adjoining drop list (see below), and set the threshold for the number of matches and the time period.

At least

Choose this option if you require a cluster of items before the notification is allowed to fire. The notification will not fire unless the specified number of items, or more, are seen within the given period.

At most

This reverses the effect of the notification, causing it to fire when there haven't been "enough" matching items within a given time period. For example, in the above screenshot, the notification will only fire if no matching item is seen within a five minute period. Here are some more examples to make this clearer:

Only fire if at most 0 matches occur within 0 hrs, 1 mins: The notification will fire if a 1 minute period passes without a single new item that matches the criteria.
Only fire if at most 1 match occurs within 0 hrs, 5 mins: If in any five minute period EventMeister sees no matching items, or only one matching item, then the notification will fire.
Only fire if at most 5 matches occur within 1 hr, 0 mins: In this case, if EventMeister sees only 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 matching items within any given hour, the notification will fire. If 6 or more items are seen, the notification will stay silent.
So, let's say you have a service that emits "I'm alive" information events once a minute, and you want to know if these events stop arriving. If the events are written to the service's own custom event log, it'll be enough to set "only fire if at most 0 matches occur within 0 hrs 2 mins" and leave the rules section blank. [A 2 minute threshold is used to allow for a little variation in the timing of the events].

If however those events are being written to a shared event log, then you'd also need to add a rule that matches only events from your service, e.g. field 'Source' equals 'myservice'.

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