Quick question - if I want worldPing to send email alerts, do I need to have an SMTP server configured for Grafana?
Alternatively - I do not currently receive email alerts from Grafana as I have not configured an SMTP server. Will I be able to receive email alerts from worldPing?
Hi,
Yes
Yes. You can receive alerts from a number notification channels in Grafana, see documentation.
Marcus
Follow-up: I have configured an SMTP server for Grafana (confirmed working) but am not receiving email alerts from worldPing when an endpoint’s health changes (alerting is enabled, using a comma-separated list of email addresses). Any tips to troubleshoot?
Hi,
Maybe change the log level to debub, see documentation.
Check the Grafana server log after you would have expected emails to be sent.
Marcus
Did as you suggested, no email alerts were sent when the status changed here and not seeing anything in the logs unfortunately. Any ideas?
What do you mean by alerting enabled? You need to have alerting enabled for a panel to be able to receive alerts.
Besides that, with your configured notification channel you should be able to send a test alert just to verify that setup.
Marcus
Ah sorry, I’m referring to the alerting in the worldPing config:
I am able to receive test alerts via email from Grafana.
Okay. I tried setting up a https check with alerting to my single email and I received an email saying “https for www.grafana.com is OK”. So could you please try and use a single email just to verify if there are any problems with having a lot of comma-separated email addresses.
Are you using the free or paid plan?
But did you know that:
Now with worldPing v1.2.2+ and Grafana v4+, the sky is the limit. Using the 100% Graphite-compatible worldPing hosted data source, you can bring metrics-based alerting into your global performance monitoring.
That’s basically mean that you can use Grafana’s native alerting feature which will give you much more alternatives, i.e. sending alerts to a lot of different notification channels like email, slack, pagerduty to name a few.
The following dashboard will show you examples of how to use Grafana’s native alerting feature for worldping.
Marcus
Thank you for the suggestions, I changed it to a single email and almost immediately received an email alert! Opened issue #209 for this. I am using the free plan, and am within the 1M monthly check limit.
Haven’t been able to setup Grafana’s native alerting on the worldPing dashboards as “template variables are not supported in alert queries” - in this case the endpoint is a template variable unfortunately.
Great!
Regarding native alerting I agree there are some limitations but I don’t think supporting template variables will solve that. Rather this issue.
You can still define an alert for a graph panel that has multiple endpoints and you’ll receive an alert if one of them evaluates above/below alert condition. You could also have one graph per endpoint with an alert on each. Please try out the example worldping dashboard I linked above if you want.
Marcus
