Indicate in mail subject that a notification is new, or periodic

[dagwieers]

We would like to indicate in our mail notifications whether an issue is a new issue, or whether it is a periodic notification (reminder). This would help our operations and engineering teams tremendously.

So instead of:

Check_MK: system01/HTTP website OK → CRIT

we would like to see:

Check_MK: system01/HTTP website OK → CRIT [NEW]

and

Check_MK: system01/HTTP website OK → CRIT [REMINDER]

Since we would like to have one reminder per shift (instead of the current 2h periodic reminder), we can avoid a mail overload, causing important new issues to be missed due to an influx of reminders.

Is something like this possible? It seems a simple, yet powerful feature.

[andreas-doehler (Andreas)]

This should be possible as the systems knows the number of the current notification for this problem.

There are two variables, one for host and one for service notifications

   $HOSTNOTIFICATIONNUMBER$
   $SERVICENOTIFICATIONNUMBER$

These two you can use in your notification template.

Your header line will look like

Check_MK: system01/HTTP website OK → CRIT - No 1

For a translation to words you can do it another way that you have two templates one for the first notification and one for all other.
This can be done with the condition “Restrict to notification number”.

[dagwieers]

That is a great start.

Would it be accepted if we provided a patch to add another variable (e.g. $NOTIFICATIONSTATE$) that would store this in plain text?

I would guess the values could be something like: NEW, REMINDER, SOLVED

Another idea we had was that the notification mails would add a header that would mark these notifications belonging to the same thread so they are listed together if the mailbox supports a threaded view. I always wanted this with Nagios 20 years ago.

That would be great for a mail-oriented operations or engineering team.