Cloudera Docs

Alert email routing

In multi-tenant or large-cluster environments, routing specific alerts to the right person can ensure a healthy deployment. With Alert email routing, you can define the alert rules in Cloudera Manager to send email alerts to selected email addresses and avoid sending all alert notifications to one or more email addresses.

Alert rules are defined based on user profiles, clusters, hosts, services, roles, host groups, service groups, service types, role groups, role types, the severity of the alert, priority, and specific health tests. A host or service or role group is a collection of hosts or services or roles respectively to which the same alert rule applies.

Some of the use cases for Alert email routing are as follows:
  • You can create a role group that includes all the secondary roles such as Data Nodes. When configuring an alert rule for this role group, you can include the email addresses of the experts of these roles so that they receive email notifications only about the critical alerts of the secondary roles. You can even silence the alerts of the non-critical roles of this group and react more quickly to the critical alerts.
  • You can create a service group that includes all the storage services such as HDFS and HBase. When configuring an alert rule for this service group, you can include the email addresses of your storage experts who should receive email notifications only about the alerts of the storage services.
  • You can create a host group that includes the hosts that are in the same rack such as Rack1. When configuring an alert rule for this host group, you can include the email addresses of the cluster administrator of these hosts who should receive email notifications only about the alerts of Rack1.
  • If the cluster operator does not need email notifications about a health test that is often in a bad state and is not critical for the operation, then the operator can define an alert rule to silence the alerts of that health test.
You can configure the following parameters for Alert email routing:
  • User profiles - A user profile defines a user or a user group who should receive email alerts.
  • Host groups - A host group defines a subset of hosts. You can use this group as one logical unit for email alerting.
  • Service groups - A service group defines a subset of services. You can use this group as one logical unit for email alerting.
  • Role groups - A role group defines a subset of roles. You can use this group as one logical unit for email alerting.
  • Alert rules - An alert rule ensures certain hosts or services or roles or health test alerts are sent to only selected email addresses.