Manage Notification Methods

From the Cloud interface, you can manage your Space's notification settings as well as allow users to personalize their notification settings.

Notification Types Reference

Netdata supports five types of notifications that you can configure:

Manage Space Notification Settings

Prerequisites

To manage Space notification settings, you will need the following:

• A Netdata Cloud account
• Access to Space as an administrator

Available Actions per Notification Method Based on Service Level

:::note

• For Netdata provided ones, you can't delete the existing notification method configuration
• Enable, Edit, and Add actions over specific notification methods will only be allowed if your plan has access to those (service classification)

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Steps to Configure Space Notifications

1. Click Space Settings (⚙️) on the left sidebar below the spaces list.
2. Click on the Alerts & Notifications tab on the left-hand side.
3. Click on the Notification Methods tab.

You will be presented with a table of the configured notification methods for the Space. You will be able to:

• Add a new notification method configuration:

  • Choose the service from the list of available ones. The available options will depend on your subscription plan.

  :::tip

  • You can optionally provide a name for the configuration so you can refer to it.
  • You can define the filtering criteria, regarding which Rooms the method will apply, and what notifications you want to receive (Critical, Warning, Clear, Reachable and Unreachable).

  :::

  • Depending on the service, different inputs will be present.

  :::note

  Please note that there are mandatory and optional inputs.

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  :::tip

  • If you have doubts on how to configure the service, you can find a link at the top of the modal that takes you to the specific documentation page to help you.

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• Edit an existing notification method configuration. Personal level ones can't be edited here, see Manage User Notification Settings. You will be able to change:

  • The name provided for it
  • Filtering criteria
  • Service-specific inputs

• Enable/Disable a given notification method configuration:

  • Use the toggle to enable or disable the notification method configuration

• Delete an existing notification method configuration. Netdata provided ones can't be deleted, e.g., Email:

  • Use the trash icon to delete your configuration

Testing Your Notification Setup

You can verify that your Cloud notification setup is working correctly by using the Agent's test functionality on any connected node:

# Switch to the Netdata user
sudo su -s /bin/bash netdata

# Enable debugging
export NETDATA_ALARM_NOTIFY_DEBUG=1

# Test default role (sysadmin)
./plugins.d/alarm-notify.sh test

# Test specific role
./plugins.d/alarm-notify.sh test "webmaster"

What Happens After Configuration

When you complete your notification setup:

1. Configuration takes effect immediately - Changes are applied as soon as you save them
2. All matching alerts will trigger notifications - Based on your filtering criteria
3. You can monitor notification delivery - Check your configured channels for test messages
4. Flood protection activates automatically - To prevent notification overload from frequently changing nodes

Manage User Notification Settings

Prerequisites

To manage user-specific notification settings, you will need the following:

• A Cloud account
• Access to at least one Space

:::note

If an administrator has disabled a Personal service level notification method, this will override any user-specific setting.

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Steps to Configure Personal Notifications

Click on your profile picture and navigate to Settings → Notifications

You are presented with:

• The Personal service level notification methods you can manage
• The list of Spaces and Rooms you have access to

On this modal you will be able to:

• Enable/Disable the notification method on a personal scope, this applies across all Spaces and Rooms
• Define what notifications you want to receive per Space/Room: Critical, Warning, Clear, Reachable and Unreachable
• Join a Room and activate notifications:
  • From the All Rooms tab, click on the Join button for the Room(s) you want

Best Practices

Based on Netdata's documentation, here are recommended practices:

Filtering Strategy

• Use Room-based filtering to organize notifications by infrastructure components
• Apply severity filtering to route Critical alerts to immediate channels (like PagerDuty) and Warning alerts to monitoring channels (like Slack)
• Utilize host labels for granular targeting of specific infrastructure segments

Avoiding Alert Fatigue

• Netdata includes built-in flood protection that limits notifications when nodes frequently change state

:::tip

• Configure different notification methods for different severity levels
• Use silencing rules during planned maintenance windows

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Related Documentation

• Alert notification silencing rules
• Service classification reference
• Agent notification testing