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Understanding Notifications

Traffic Director has two types of Notifications: Service Level and Monitor Level. This page outlines all of the information needed to know the difference between notification types and the proper use of each to get the results you need from Traffic Director.

Service Notifications are useful to humans because they say when the service actually changes; whereas the Monitor Notifiers alert whenever a single health probe fails. The latter can be very noisy if being viewed by an actual person.

Sample Email Notifications will help you know what to expect in your email once you have notifications set up.

DNS Knowledge Base

DNS API Knowledge Base

 

Service Notifiers

Monitor Notifiers
Emails sent when Traffic Director Service state changes based on the following:

User Initiated – Changes to the service made by a user via the GUI or API.
System Initiated – Automated changes to the service made by our systems, generally in response to monitored endpoints going up or down.
Zone Publishing – Changes to the service that immediately impact your DNS responses.
Non-Publishing – Changes to the service that don’t immediately impact your DNS responses.

 Emails sent when activity at the end point(s) occurs. Alerts recipients about changes in the health of individual resources.

Probably most useful for consumption by an automated system.
Email frequency is lower than Monitor Notifications. Email frequency can be quite high and may overwhelm your inbox.
Recommended Best Practices and Important Information:
1. Set Service level notifications to ‘detailed’. You will see information about changes without the high volume of notifications sent from the monitor.
2. Each Traffic Director Service can only have one Monitor/Notifier pair.
3. The Monitor itself can only be set to monitor 1 of the 5 protocols for each Traffic Director Service.
4. The Notifier determines who receives the Email, the contents of the Service Email (Summary or Detailed), and the format of the Email.
5. In the User Interface, both Service and Monitor Notifications are set in the Service Control view.
6. System Initiated Service Notifications may be based on Monitor activity, such as if a Monitor detects an asset is offline, a System Initiated action may pull that asset from being served for a DNS query.
Email content can be Summary or Detail level. The detail level contains more information about the service state as outlined in the email content section. Email content is standard for all Monitors. Monitor Notifiers occur at a higher frequency than Service Notifiers. Monitor Notifiers can easily overwhelm a Notifier’s email.
Use these help topics to add Service Notifiers:

Create Notifier (API), to create a notifier, to add a Notifier to the Traffic Director Service, or

Create a Notifier, to create the notifier, and
Adding a Notification, to add a Notifier using the Managed DNS portal.

 Use these help topics to add Monitor Notifiers:

Create Traffic Director (DSF) Monitor (API), to create a monitor, and
Create Notifier (API), to create a notifier, and
Update Traffic Director (DSF) Record Set (API), to add the monitor and notifier IDs to the Record Set, or

Managing Monitors, to create a monitor and notifier for the Traffic Director Service.

 

Service Email Notification

Monitor Email Notification
This table explains the contents of a standard Email that would be sent by the Notifier when the associated Traffic Director service changed. This table explains the contents of a standard Email that would be sent by the Notifier when the associated monitored endpoint changed.
Email Field Description of the field’s contents: Items prefaced by (All) appear in summary and detailed emails, while those with (Detail) only appear in detailed messages. Email Field Description of the field’s contents
From Address: Dyn <notifications@dyn.com> From: Dyn <notifications@dyn.com>
Subject: Traffic Director Service Alert: [service_label] changed by ([username] | ‘Monitoring Results’). Reply To: Dyn Concierge <concierge@dyn.com&gt
Start of Body (All) Changes as of YYYY-MM-DDThh:mmZ (if Monitoring Results:) & Probe Interval [epoch_timestamp]
(Detail) View service at https://manage.dynect.net/services/DSF/[service_label]/		 Subject: DynECT Monitoring Alert <endpoint> detected <“up”/”down”> by <monitor protocol> monitor <monitor label>
Ineligible Identifies records that are now ineligible to serve for DNS queries.
(All) Unique identification information for the object.
(Detail) Per-agent information about monitored state that caused the change		 Endpoint Status <endpoint> is currently <“up”/”down”> as of <YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm >Z
Eligible Identifies records that are now eligible to serve for DNS queries.
(All) Unique identification information for the object.
(Detail) Per-agent information about monitored state that caused the change		 For Each Site: Detected <“up”/”down”> from <site>
(Detail) output <detail>
Changed Identifies items changed in the Traffic Director service.
(All) Unique identification information for the object.
(All) Identifies the current child object being served from, e.g. what Record Set a Response Pool is serving.
(Detail) Lists fields that changed, including the old and new value.
Removed Identifies objects that were removed/deleted from the service.
(All) Unique identification information for the object.
Added Identifies objects that were added to the service.
(All) Unique identification information for the object.
Attached Identifies all nodes added to the Traffic Director service.
(All) The full name of the node.
Detached Identifies all nodes removed from the Traffic Director service.
(All) The full name of the node.
Affects Identifies the nodes impacted by these changes.
(All) One node and a count of other nodes affected.
(Detail) A list of all additional nodes affected.