Managing and taking actions on Alerts is a crucial part of IoT Device Management and allows you to react to events such as notifying a technician to replace a sensor if the battery is low or send a text message if the pressure of the heat pump is running high. There are several built-in Alerts and you can also configure your own.

Alerts are only available on managed Organizations and can be enabled on the Organization page.

What is an Alert?

An Alert can be created from anywhere but most commonly from a Node and is commonly some abnormality you’d like to take action on. All incidents have an identifier (error code), a description and an action. Actions are described in detail below.

Create a custom alert

A Custom Alert is implemented using three parts: The identifier (error code), description and an action. Navigate to the Organization page, and scroll down to the ServiceNow section. If your organization is managed, the MANAGE ALERTS button is enabled. Click the button to open the Manage Alert dialog.

By default, there should be two policies already created for you; Unhanded Exceptions and Offline Nodes. These are described in detail in the Default policies section below. Click the Add new record button on top to create a new row in the table. Set a Error code and describe the Alert. Finally, select an Action and set the parameters.

SD-Card composition Please note that you can have multiple actions on the same Error code.

Actions

Send issue email

The * Send issue email* action sends an hourly aggregated notification of all incidents to participants you’ve configured clicking the Params button (…). The to element can hold a comma separated list of email addresses who subscribes to this event.

{
    "to": "peter@organization.com,elsa@organization.com"
}

Send issue SMS

Similar to the * Send issue email* action, this action sends an hourly notification to participants you’ve configured clicking the Params button (…).

Property Description
to Comma separated list of phone numbers. Don’t forget to use country code.
workingHours (Optional) To prevent receiving text messages during certain hours of the day set the to and from for when you accept messages. Set the timeZone field according to supported timezones.

Sample

{
  "to": "+4612121212,+43334343453",
  "workingHours": {
    "from": "08: 00",
    "to": "18: 00",
    "timeZone": "W. Europe Standard Time"
  }
}

Call API

The Call API will send a POST request of every incident to a REST service of your choice. Configure the parameters as the table below:

Property Description
postUrl The address of your service.
authToken (Optional) If your service require token authentication.
authTokenType (Optional) Eg Bearer or Basic
headers A list of custom headers.

Samples:

Using bearer token

{
    "postUrl": "https://localhost:44302/api/test",
    "authToken": "0Emg2W42NysRnxdnMUlIzrkbxGDPo4m31cOZ8NHWS7OPxkXPf4hJobBjH45HIivRDn6VKPxKoFYzQeIF3VOlBToSUi36xmys1I1aGyHQ8",
    "authTokenType": "Bearer"
}

Using custom header

{
    "postUrl": "https://localhost:44302/api/test",
    "heades": ["api-key","6U5mb1L4zeaD8QXXpladlL1y50vv "]
}

Sample REST service (C#)

public class TestController : BaseApiController
    {
        [HttpPost]
        [Route("api/test")]
        public async Task<HttpResponseMessage> Post()
        {
            string result = await Request.Content.ReadAsStringAsync();
            var request = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<dynamic>(result);

            // YOUR CODE

            var response = Request.CreateResponse(HttpStatusCode.Created, new { success = true, request = request });
            return response;
        }
    }

Create ticket (default Alert)

The Create ticket action will create an Alert in ServiceNow and does not require any parameters. This action is part for the Unhanded Exception (error code 90000) default policy.

Handle offline Node (default Alert)

When Nodes come offline a workflow will be triggered which does the following:

  1. Create an Alert in ServiceNow (error code 90001)
  2. After 10 minutes, check if the Node is still offline
  3. If the Node is still offline, update the status incident to In Process, otherwise close the incident.

Supported triggers and error codes

Error code Description
90000 Unhanded Exception
90001 Node is offline
90006 Organization has npm vulnerabilities
90007 Organization has Snaps to be updated
90010 Failed login
90011 Invalid user login
90020 Data plan limit approaching
90021 Data plan reached
90030 Missing sensor readings
90040 High storage utilizations
90041 Storage failure
90050 High memory utilization
90060 Failed to start snap
90061 Snap crash
90070 High cpu utilization
90100 Failed to start docker container
90101 Docker containers crash
90102 Custom docker log event