<%NUMBERING1%>.<%NUMBERING2%>.<%NUMBERING3%> PRTG Manual: Notifications

PRTG uses notifications to send you alerts whenever PRTG discovers a defined status, such as slow or failing sensors, or when sensor channels breach threshold values. You can define an unlimited number of notifications allowing to use one, or more, of several communication channels like email, text messaging, push notifications to Android and iOS devices, and many more. PRTG sends notifications to the desired user's Notification Contacts that you can define for each user account of your PRTG installation.

See also our video tutorials for notifications:

• Video Tutorial: Use Cases for Notifications
• Video Tutorial: How to Set Up and Use Notifications in PRTG

Overview

PRTG sends a notification when a defined event evokes it. The following events can trigger notifications:

• Sensor status changes
  For example, when a sensor changes status to Down or Warning, if responses are slow, or sensors show an Unusual status.
• Sensor value threshold breaches
  For example, when a sensor shows a request time higher than 1,000 ms for more than 30 minutes, or when free disk space is below 10%.
• Speed threshold breaches
  For example, when a traffic sensor shows more than 1 Mbit/s for more than 5 minutes.
• Volume threshold breaches
  For example, when a traffic sensor shows more than 1 Gbyte transferred in 24 hours.
• Sensor value changes
  For some sensors you can trigger a notification whenever the value changes, for example, when monitoring files on a hard disk drive.

A notification can be one of these actions:

• Send Email
• Send Push Notification
• Send SMS/Pager Message
• Add Entry to Event Log
• Send Syslog Message
• Send SNMP Trap
• Execute HTTP Action
• Execute Program
• Send Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) Message
• Assign Ticket

For details, see section Account Settings—Notifications.

Usually there are three successive attempts to deliver a notification. If all of these attempts fail, the notification is lost. To never miss a notification, we recommend that you always add two different ways to get a notification. For example, use the latency setting of a state trigger to choose a notification with another delivery method than in the first trigger condition, or set up a second trigger with another notification for the corresponding object.

Notifications can contain valuable sensor information, such as:

• Last error message
• Last good/failed request
• Total downtime
• Total uptime
• Recent sensor history
• A direct link to the web interface

For available placeholders, see this Knowledge Base article: What placeholders can I use with PRTG?

Notifications Setup

Overall, you have to go through four steps to use notifications with PRTG. Please go through all of them for a first setup:

1. Check and set up the Notification Delivery settings. This tells PRTG how to send messages.
   For detailed information, see System Administration—Notification Delivery.

This only applies to PRTG on premises instances, not to PRTG on demand.

1. Check and set up Notification Contacts for the users of your PRTG installation. This defines where to send notifications.
   For detailed information, see Account Settings—Notification Contacts.
2. Check and set up several Notifications. This defines the kind of message and its content.
   For detailed information, see Account Settings—Notifications.
3. Check and set up Notification Triggers for objects. These provoke the defined notifications.
   For detailed information, see Sensor Notifications Settings.

We recommend that you always set up at least two notifications with different delivery methods for a notification trigger, for example, one email notification and one SMS notification. If delivery via email fails (due to a email server outage or for other reasons), PRTG can still notify you via your smartphone in this case as a fallback. You can achieve this, for example, by using the latency setting in a state trigger and selecting a notification with another delivery method than for the first trigger condition.

Please see the sections Setting Up Notifications Based on Sensor Limits: Example and Setting up Notifications Based on Libraries: Example for a step-by-step guide that describes a potential notifications setup.

There are also custom notification scripts available in the PRTG Script World.

More

Video Tutorial: Use Cases for Notifications

• https://www.paessler.com/support/video_tutorials/notification-and-trigger

Video Tutorial: How to Set Up and Use Notifications in PRTG

• https://www.paessler.com/support/videos/prtg-basics/notifications

Knowledge Base: What placeholders can I use with PRTG?

• https://kb.paessler.com/en/topic/373

Knowledge Base: Notifications based on priorities

• https://kb.paessler.com/en/topic/31243

 

Ajax Web Interface—Advanced Procedures—Topics

• Toplists
• Arrange Objects
• Clone Object
• Multi-Edit
• Create Device Template
• Show Dependencies
• Geo Maps
• Notifications
• Libraries
• Reports
• Maps
• Setup

Other Ajax Web Interface Sections

• Ajax Web Interface—Basic Procedures
• Ajax Web Interface—Device and Sensor Setup

Related Topics

• Enterprise Console
• PRTG Apps for Mobile Network Monitoring