Office 2007 Professional Email Acknowledgment - Po

Background
Event driven network monitoring programs depend on acknowledgment for numerous reasons. These good reasons contain:
To let other Zenoss administrators and consumers realize that somebody is informed of the dilemma and taking motion.To suppress escalation of alerts.
To acknowledge an alert, a responder typically:
Clicks the acknowledge hyperlink in the system with the default Zenoss alert e mail.Logs in to the Zenoss server, navigates to the inform on the system or inside the celebration supervisor, and acknowledges the inform.
This procedure operates effectively when you happen to be inside the workplace or your operations are organization hrs only. Usually,Office 2010 Activation, that is not the situation for many users of Zenoss. Most customers have essential programs that call for 24x7 monitoring and alerting. Additionally, managers and executives require escalation of messages from your on-call personnel by way of management and occasionally to government management.

The acknowledgment model of Zenoss, in its current state, is limited. An inform will never escalate, as long as it is acknowledged. In a 24x7 monitoring and alerting model, an inform can and will come during non-business several hours. The first responder (on-call personnel) is usually mobile and does not always have immediate access to a computer. To compound this, many Zenoss servers live on private networks that call for VPN authentication to access them. There are times where the on-call personnel can not get in to the system quick enough to prevent escalation from occuring. We all know how upset managers get when the on-call grunt doesn't do her job properly.

One possible solution to this issue is electronic mail based celebration acknowledgment. The on-call responder replies towards the alert electronic mail on her PDA. The inform e-mail is routed back to the Zenoss server for processing with Procmail. The entire body of your e-mail is piped into a python script, via Procmail. The system and occasion id are extracted and the alert is acknowleged by means of Zenoss API calls. An electronic mail is sent back to your responder reporting whether or not the acknowledgment was successful.

The biggest caveat, for this model,Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010, is that incoming mail needs to be routed to your Zenoss server. As such, this will need knowledge of mail relay administration or you'll need to rope in your mail relay administrator to help you out. Since every company's mail setup is unique (Spam filters, Exchange Servers,Office 2007 Pro Plus Key, Postfix Servers, et. al) I will leave this as an exercise for the user of this how-to. The second caveat is that your mail relay becomes a single point of failure for delivery. If your mail relay is down or in schedule maintenance, you won't be able to acknowledge events.

** This will work with plain-text, base64 encoded and multipart e-mail types (Iphone, Blackberry, Exchange). I have tested this on Zenoss Core 2.4.5 and 2.5.0
InstallationPostfix Installation
Install Postfix from RPM or source.
Procmail Installation
Install Procmail from RPM or source and configure per the README.
ConfigurationPostfix Configuration
Edit your configuration file to use procmail. This can be generally located at:

vi /etc/postfix/main.cf

Edit mailbox_command to reflect the path of your Procmail installation.

mailbox_command = /usr/bin/procmail

Restart Postfix

/etc/init.d/postfix restartProcmail Configuration
We will be filtering email at the user level, not the system level.

As the zenoss user:

vi ~/.procmailrc
chmod 600 ~/.procmailrc

Create a procmail directory to log to.

mkdir ~/procmail

Copy and paste these two sections into your .procmailrc. There can be space between them. The first section exports basic environment variables.

SHELL=/bin/bash
PMDIR=$HOME/procmail
LOGFILE=$PMDIR/pmlog
ZENHOME=/usr/local/zenoss
PYTHONPATH=$ZENHOME/lib/python
PATH=$ZENHOME/bin:$PATH

The next section is the Procmail formula. This says for any message that contains '[zenoss]' inside the subject, forward the header and entire body (as STDIN) to /home/zenoss/zenemailack.py and redirect STDOUT and STDERR to $ZENHOME/log/zenemailack.log. This forumla also locks and waits until the script has finished. You can relocate zenemailack.py anywhere on your system,Office 2007 Professional, just update the path from the formula accordingly.

:0
* ^Subject:.*\[zenoss\].*
/home/zenoss/zenemailack.py >> $ZENHOME/log/zenemailack.log 2>&1Zenoss UI Configuration
Under the 'settings' tab, from your 'settings' link about the main navigation menu (left navbar), change this value to reflect the valid electronic mail address to your zenoss user.

From Address For Emails        zenoss@server.mydomain.com

* You must be able to receive emails at this e mail address on your Zenoss server.
Zenoss Server Configuration
Download the attached script below (zenemailack.py) and place it in /home/zenoss. You can install the file to any location of your choice. If you use a different location, make sure to update the Procmail formula to reflect the new path of your installation.

Change permissions to make the script executable.

chmod 755 ~/zenemailack.py

Edit zenemailack.py and change these variables to suit your environment:

# Update for outgoing e-mail
MAIL = "/usr/sbin/sendmail -t "
from_addr = "zenoss@server.mydomain.com" cc_address = "" TestingGeneral
The first step is to make sure you can receive emails at zenoss@server.mydomain.com. If you can't receive a basic electronic mail, resolve this or you are out of luck.
Procmail
Once you can successfully receive emails, make sure that procmail is working. You can create a test formula in your .procmailrc to test that it's working correctly.

vi ~/.procmailrc

Append this to your .procmailrc and save it.

:0
* ^Subject:.*test
/dev/null

As zenoss user, test Procmail functionality by sending yourself an e mail with 'test' as the subject.

echo "foo" | mailx -s "test" zenoss

Check the procmail log for success.

tail ~/procmail/pmlog
From zenoss@localhost  Wed Sep  3 16:11:26 2008 Subject: test
  Folder: /dev/null                                595
If you have no entry for this test in your Procmail log,Office Standard, Procmail just isn't working properly. Check your installation, double check that Postfix is configured to use Procmail and that you re-started Postfix after you configured it to use Procmail.

Re-edit ~/.procmailrc and remove the test formula you added above. Your .procmailrc should look like this after.

SHELL=/bin/bash
PMDIR=$HOME/procmail
LOGFILE=$PMDIR/pmlog
ZENHOME=/usr/local/zenoss
PYTHONPATH=$ZENHOME/lib/python
PATH=$ZENHOME/bin:$PATH
:0
* ^Subject:.*\[zenoss\].*
/home/zenoss/zenemailack.py >> $ZENHOME/log/zenemailack.log 2>&1Zenoss
Once you've verified that you can recieve emails and Procmail functions, test this with an actual event.

If you might be impatient, you can inject an function into Zenoss. To do this, you can follow the admin guide. Just make sure your celebration matches an alertable condition.

Admin Guide - 7.1.8.1 – Creating Events Via the User Interface

If you are not impatient, just wait around until you get an alert. Once you receive the inform, simply reply. There is no need to type anything in your reply.
Make sure that your mail editor includes the physique of your alert when you reply. I don't know of any that don't, by default, but I'm just throwing that in there.
You should receive a verification e mail back saying that the alert has been acknowledged or not. You’ll only receive a verification reply if the inform is in an unacknowledged state or something crapped out during the attempted acknowledgment. If you don’t get a reply email, the inform most likely cleared itself and has been moved to history, by Zenoss.  Once an occasion has been acknowledged, any reply-to-all e mail threads will not generate email noise. They will, however, be logged.

For debugging or troubleshooting, you can view the log at:

$ZENHOME/log/zenemailack.logCaveatsThis script parses the username form the e-mail address. If the username in your e-mail does not correlate to your username in Zenoss, this may lead to confusion. If you setup your server to use LDAP, this should never be an issue.This script assumes that you have not changed the format of your alert email. If you have, you'll need to at least include the gadget and Event ID URL in the message body.
Device: %(gadget)s
<a href="%(eventUrl)s">Function Detail</a>The ownerid will be updated when you view the details of the function. However, when you click around the log tab, the user will show as admin. To me, this isn't a show stopper. If I can clearly see who took ownership with the event, the user stamp on the log doesn't matter. If I could figure out how to properly update this field, I would.Your Procmail log may take up a lot of space depending on how many devices you have and how many alerts you generate. Logging is generally useful for troubleshooting issues with Procmail. You may want to add this directory to logrotate.
vi /etc/logrotate.d/procmail_log

Add:

/home/zenoss/procmail/* weekly
rotate 2
copytruncate

Optionally, once Procmail performs, you could disable logging by commenting out this line in your .procmailrc

#LOGFILE=$PMDIR/pmlogLegal
Please feel free to contact me directly if you wish to use this in publication or for other commercial good reasons.

Scott Haskell
shaskell614@yahoo.com