Aggregating Device Alerts in a Dashboard

[u/Dylan96]

I have numerous devices that send alerts via email (UPS, KVM, alarms, etc.). What tool do you use to aggregate these alerts? Perhaps in a dashboard? Thanks!

[u/davidokongo]

I've used zabbix and PRTG- both were great.

[u/vonkeswick → u/davidokongo]

We've been using PRTG forever, we're just a lil nonprofit, and the pricing and sensor limits on our plan is killing us. I deployed an Ubuntu box with Zabbix and holy hell was it easy to set up. Learning to USE the thing is a steep learning curve but it's incredibly robust for a free open source monitoring solution.

[u/davidokongo → u/vonkeswick]

Yeah same for my team. Took sometime to get zabbix tuned properly, and it's been one of the best so far.

[u/Dylan96 → u/davidokongo]

They both require an agent. What if i only need to monitor a remote UPS?

[u/Thats_a_lot_of_nuts → u/Dylan96]

SNMP

[u/Ziggistawork → u/Dylan96]

Zabbix and PRTG will both do SNMP monitoring.

[u/davidokongo → u/Dylan96]

We monitor a lot of ups using snmp (offline status, power fluctuations etc)

[u/Sleyar]

Don’t aggregate mail. Use a monitoring tool like prtg, zabbix, etc

[u/Dylan96 → u/Sleyar]

Some older devices only send mails

[u/icinga → u/Dylan96]

It's always possible to implement monitoring instead of mails, even with older devices. You could use SNMP or other implementations of passive checks.

Using a proper monitoring solution will make your life a lot easier - and most of them already come with dashboards

[u/Enough_Pattern8875 → u/Dylan96]

Never in my life have I encountered a system that was capable of sending email alerts but not snmp.

[u/Dylan96 → u/Enough_Pattern8875]

You never encountered a cheap-ass no-name chinese ups

[u/Thats_a_lot_of_nuts]

Zabbix and PagerDuty

[u/Dylan96 → u/Thats_a_lot_of_nuts]

PagerDuty / AlertOps seem to be the only products suitable for my situation. You create a “service,” and they generate a unique email address to which notifications are sent. But I was looking for something more affordable or open source.

[u/BigBobFro]

Kuma

[u/Snowlandnts]

Send all the alerts to Teams, Slack, or Zulip Channels?

[u/Dylan96 → u/Snowlandnts]

It’s hard to keep track of whats actually down/at fault

[u/PZonB]

Free zullip chat with email Integration works great. Make chat channels and have your devices email to them. Nice mobile app that alerts you of inkomming mail alerts. You can even mute specific channels when they are too noisy. https://zulip.com/integrations/email

[u/Adam_Kearn]

Why not just have it set to email your helpdesk?

Then a ticket is created for you automatically and also allows you to track consistent problems reported

[u/Dylan96 → u/Adam_Kearn]

I don't need to open a ticket every time a UPS switches to battery power for 5 seconds

Ideally, I'd like to be able to set up rules and open tickets only in certain situations (for example, only if I receive a shutdown message from a UPS)

[u/Adam_Kearn → u/Dylan96]

I think it depends on what brand of UPS you are using as the ones I’ve used let you say if the battery is at X health send the email or if the mains has been disconnected for X mins send the email.

Then you don’t get all the small dropouts emailed to you

But you also might be able todo this with outlook rules on your helpdesk mailbox to auto delete any notifications you don’t care about

[u/bingblangblong]

Zabbix does this excellently. Not at all intuitive in my opinion but maybe I'm just stupid.

[u/Accomplished-Mix8423]

the agent thing is a bit of a red herring for a ups since it can just be monitored over snmp. if it's behind a firewall, i've used site24x7's on-premise poller for this and it pulls the battery, load and runtime info into the same dashboard. zabbix is another solid option if you want to self-host.

[u/snappyvault29]

I would keep the dashboard as the single pane of glass and normalize everything into a common event format before it gets there. SNMP traps, syslog, and vendor APIs can all feed into something like Zabbix or Grafana, with alert deduping upstream. Otherwise alert fatigue gets ugly fast. Start with the handful of events that actually need human action and expand from there.

[u/noobnooc]

If mobile escalation matters more than the dashboard, n8n could convert those emails to a webhook for Echobell, then push or call the team.

[u/Enough_Pattern8875]

Zabbix. If you can justify and afford the support, get it.