Creating Custom Alert Scripts in up.time Alert Profiles

Article Contents

• Overview
• How custom alert scripts work
• Environment Variable Examples

Overview

When a service outage occurs, up.time can generate an alert in a number of ways including sending an email, opening a Windows pop-up or initiating a pager message. You can also define your own Script Alert that will be executed on the monitoring station when an outage occurs. You can use the Script Alert option to create custom alerting methods that fit your exact needs. Some examples of custom alerting implementations include:

• SMS modem-based alerting
• TAPI modem alerting
• Internal Problem Ticket creation system alerts
• On call team rotation
• Customized alert email body formatting

How custom alert scripts work

Custom alert scripts are defined with the Script Alert option on the Alert Profile page. The script is a path to a script or executable on the monitoring station system that up.time will run when a service outage occurs. You control the actions that the script or executable takes, which provides full control over how up.time sends out alert notifications during a service outage.

Note: For Windows alert scripts, the path used must use UNIX-style / instead of \ and must be quoted if your path contains spaces. For example:
"C:/Program Files/uptime software/uptime/scripts/my_custom_alerter.bat"

When up.time runs the script or executable, it passes on information about the specific service outage that triggered the alert. This information is passed using the system environment variables that are local to each execution of the recovery script. The script or executable is run once for each up.time user that will be notified using this alert.

The environment variables passed to the alert script and their meanings are included below:

Environment Variable Examples

How the script or executable uses environment variables will vary depending on the language you have used to write your script or executable. The following examples illustrate how environment variables are accessed in several common languages: