Configure Email Notifications

Enable Mail Server (SMTP) for notifications

An external SMTP server is required to enable alerts by email.

During the setup of the cluster provisioning configuration, you will be prompted by an editor to edit the tfvar file and set the required variables. For more information, see Continue with Edge Orchestrator Installation.

These variables also need to be set in the pod-configs/module/orch-init/variable.tf file of the edge-manageability-framework repository.

smtp_user = "SMTP server username"
smtp_pass = "SMTP server password"
smtp_url = "SMTP server address"
smtp_port = 587  # SMTP port of mail server, default is 587
smtp_from = "SMTP from header"

Email Notifications

Email notifications require an external SMTP server populated on the target cluster. Refer to the section above, on SMTP, for additional details.

To enable email notifications, you need to add the alerting-emails profile to the clusterValues. See an example of the following profile:

root:
useLocalValues: true
clusterValues:
   - profiles/enable-platform.yaml
   - profiles/enable-o11y.yaml
   - profiles/enable-kyverno.yaml
   - profiles/enable-ma.yaml
   - profiles/enable-mc.yaml
   - profiles/enable-mi.yaml
   - profiles/enable-full-ui.yaml
   - profiles/enable-integration.yaml
   - profiles/enable-docs-service.yaml
   # proxy group must be specified as the first post-"enable" profile
   - profiles/proxy-none.yaml
   - profiles/profile-aws.yaml
   - profiles/o11y-release.yaml
   # This profile needs to be added to enable email alerts
   - profiles/alerting-emails.yaml
   - profiles/release-service-external.yaml
   - clusters/example.yaml

Using self-signed certificates with SMTP server

When the notification feature sends alerts using an SMTP server, it relays this to the Prometheus* Alertmanager, which attempts to verify the identity of the SMTP server using its SSL/TLS certificate.

Prometheus Alertmanager trusts CAs added by the Prometheus Team from the Debian* OS distribution ca-certificates, and checks that the certificate is signed by a trusted CA.

If the SMTP server is using a self-signed certificate, or a certificate signed by a non-public CA, this verification process will fail. Self-signed certificates and certificates signed by non-public CAs aren’t automatically trusted.

Configure self-signed or non-public SMTP server

Warning

Disabling verification makes the connection to the SMTP server less secure because this allows connections to servers with untrusted certificates. Use this option only if you understand the risks.

Disable the SMTP server identity verification.

Add the following line in the configuration file to the Argo configuration.

argo:
   o11y:
      alertingMonitor:
         smtp:
            insecureSkipVerify: true

In this example, the insecureSkipVerify: true line disables the SMTP server identity verification.

Troubleshooting

Warning

You must only enable email notifications for alerts during the install phase. Intel does not support email notifications added during runtime.

Cluster examples provided in orch-configs contain profiles/alerting-emails.yaml that enables alert notifications by default. This implies that the secrets containing SMTP server data needs to be provided during install phase, otherwise the alerting-monitor application deployment will fail.

Note

In the profiles/alerting-emails.yaml was enabled but required secrets were not provided, the deployment will fail. To recover from this, you need to provide the secrets containing SMTP server data, followed by redeployment of the full alerting-monitor application.

Turn off email notifications

To turn off email notifications for alerts, you need to remove profiles/alerting-emails.yaml from target cluster definition.