Send a notification

Status

Variants

Post to a chat or push service

Post a message to a chat channel or a push notification service such as Slack, Teams, ntfy or Pushover.

Send an email

Send an email, with optional attachments or the data in its body, to fixed recipients when the run reaches a step.

Send an alert to a monitoring system

Raise an alert in a monitoring or notification system, such as a Nagios check, an SNMP trap or an SNS topic.

Other notifications

Signal a person in other ways, such as raising an issue on a team board or playing a sound.

What other tools call it

Meridian's classification; an independent blind rating agreed on 86.2% of 312 rows (exact class, version 2).

Background

When to use it

In Apache Hop, it is not uncommon at the end of a successful load to email a distribution list announcing that the load was successful, with a log file included.^[1] In Apache Hop, if there are errors, the Mail action can send an email to alert individuals on a distribution list.^[1] In Apache Hop, the Mail action's Manage Priority option sets the priority and sensitivity of a message, and failures might typically be sent with a higher priority than successes.^[1] In EasyMorph, the Send message to Pushover action can send notifications and metrics to mobile devices, or alert when an event happened, such as a metric exceeding a threshold.^[3] Send a notification when someone would otherwise have to go and look: a failed load, a figure past its threshold, a file that is ready. (Meridian's view)

In Apache Hop, the AWS SNS notify transform sends notifications from a pipeline through Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Notification Service (SNS) to subscribed users.^[4] In Apache Hop, the AWS SNS notify transform sends either a notification with the first row, which is marked recommended, or one for each row, with a warning not to spam users.^[4] In EasyMorph, the Raise issue action can create a new issue only when none of the open issues it created shares a deduplication key, and its option to always create one is marked not recommended.^[5] Send one message per run, or per open problem, unless each message really has its own reader; a run that fails the same way every hour should not raise a fresh alert every hour. (Meridian's view)

In EasyMorph, the Slack Bot and Teams Bot actions cannot send messages into private chats, only to channels.^[2][6] Treat a notification as a step that can fail on its own: a mail server that refuses the message or a chat service that throttles it should not leave the run itself looking broken, nor silently swallow the alert. (Meridian's view)

The method

The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard communication protocol for electronic mail transmission.^[7] SMTP's origins began in 1980, and the protocol has been updated, modified and extended multiple times.^[7] SMTP servers commonly use port 25 between servers and 587 for submission from authenticated clients, and 465 with encryption for submission.^[7] In Apache Hop, the Mail action requires an SMTP server, and using authentication on the connection requires the SMTP credentials.^[1]

In Apache NiFi, the PublishSlack processor sends messages using Slack's chat.postMessage API.^[8] In Apache NiFi, the PublishSlack processor needs a Slack App created and installed in the workspace, with a token that has the chat:write scope.^[8] In EasyMorph, a Teams Bot message can be plain text or an Adaptive Card, which can be richly formatted and contain hyperlinks, images and buttons.^[6] In EasyMorph, a Pushover message is either a parameterised text message generated from a template or a list of named values taken from the first row of the input dataset.^[3]

In Apache Hop, the AWS SNS notify transform pushes its messages to one or more subscription topics, which must be created beforehand.^[4] In Apache Hop, the Send Nagios passive check action logs a message to a Nagios server under a service name, at a level of Unknown, OK, Warning or Critical.^[9]

Sources

1. [1]Mail | Apache Hopdocumentation
2. [2]SLACK BOT [EasyMorph Help]documentation
3. [3]SEND MESSAGE TO PUSHOVER [EasyMorph Help]documentation
4. [4]AWS SNS notify | Apache Hopdocumentation
5. [5]RAISE ISSUE [EasyMorph Help]documentation
6. [6]TEAMS BOT [EasyMorph Help]documentation
7. [7]Simple Mail Transfer Protocolsecondary source
8. [8]PublishSlack - Apache NiFidocumentation
9. [9]Send Nagios passive check | Apache Hopdocumentation