pulling text from db to add to error message

On 8/16/2018 at 9:14 AM, mnagel said:

In the previous monitoring tool we deployed for our clients (Nagios primarily), we developed a notification script that used a Perl Template::Toolkit handler to generate the output (this could be any of a number of template systems like jinja2, etc., we are just old-school Perl geeks).  One of the features in our system is a callback function that allows running a limited set of scripts to gather more information, just like an admin would if they were involved at the time the alert triggered.  Since the output from the callback was available to the template code, we could also create conditional output based on the callback output.  For example, if a callback produced a list of the top 5 processes from a Windows box, we would generally tack that onto the notification as additional information.  But the template could also check if the output contained a particular process, at which point it could add "Also, since XXX is high, please refer to YYY for more information on how to troubleshoot".  We have had that in place for like 10 years and it has been extremely frustrating to be restricted to unconditional token substitution.

So I found out today that you can't even generally insert properties into the existing alerts.  If you want an email alert that you can reply to ACK or SDT, you cannot use a custom integration.  If you do not use a custom integration and want to append something to alerts, you would have to edit EVERY datapoint template.  I was actually advised to use the API to append my custom token expansion into every datapoint template, which is not going to happen, for many many reasons.  This is a huge issue that needs immediate attention -- we have to be able to customize what appears in alerts per client.  The closest I have is custom integration since MESSAGE is the result of whatever template is filled out.  If the custom email integration could act the same as regular email, then that would be a feasible solution.