Event notifications

StackState Self-hosted v4.5.x

This page describes StackState v4.5.x. The StackState 4.5 version range is End of Life (EOL) and no longer supported. We encourage customers still running the 4.5 version range to upgrade to a more recent release.

Go to the documentation for the latest StackState release.

Overview

When something goes wrong within your IT environment, StackState can send event notifications to alert you or your team mates. A message can be sent in the form of an email, Slack message, mobile ping or an HTTP POST request to any URL. Event notifications can contain detailed content on the trigger event and possible root cause.

Event handlers

Event handlers can be added to a StackState view to send event notifications or trigger actions in response to health state change events or problem events that are generated within the view. The event handler will listen to generated events and run a configured event handler function when the configured event type is generated.

You can add an event handler to a view from the StackState UI Manage Event Handlers pane.

Event types for notifications

Event handlers can be configured to respond to state change events and problem events.

Only events related to components are captured in event handlers, relation-related events will be ignored.

State change events

Metrics and events data flow through StackState topology elements in telemetry streams. These telemetry streams are used by health checks to determine the health state of an element. For every change in health state, at least one state change event is generated. Use the Manage Event Handlers pane to add an event handler to the view and trigger an event notification or action whenever state changed events are generated.

The event types generated when an element state changes are described in the table below.

Event typeDescription

HealthStateChangedEvent

State change of an element Generated when the health state of an element changes. These events will be listed in the StackState UI Events Perspective.

PropagatedStateChangedEvent

Propagated state change of an element Generated whenever the health state of one of an element’s dependencies changes. These events are not visible in the StackState UI, but can be used to trigger an event notification.

ViewStateChangedEvent

State change of entire view Generated only when the health state of a significant number of elements in a view changes. These events are not visible in the StackState UI, but can be used to trigger event notifications. Note that there may be a slight delay between the generation of a HealthStateChangedEvent for an element and the resulting ViewStateChangedEvent. This can cause the reported state of a view to differ from the actual state of elements within it.

Problem events

StackState groups unhealthy components in a view into problems, each with a common root cause. For every change to a problem, at least one problem event is generated. Use the Manage Event Handlers pane to add an event handler to the view and trigger an event notification or action whenever problem events are generated.

Changes to a problem result in the following event types being generated. Note that there may be a slight delay between the generation of a health state change event for an element and the resulting Problem event:

Event typeDescription

ProblemCreated

A new problem has been created.

ProblemUpdated

New information is available for a problem. For example, a new root cause or contributing cause being added to the problem, or an update to a check on an existing unhealthy component.

ProblemSubsumed

A change in root cause or the topology as a whole has caused an existing problem to be joined with another problem. For example, a new relation has been created.

ProblemResolved

The root cause component and all contributing cause components have reported a CLEAR (green) health state. No unhealthy components remain in the problem.

➡️ Learn more about the problem lifecycle

See also

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