dv2email

dv2email - Dataview To HTML

dv2email is a lightweight program to capture and transform Geneos Dataviews to HTML suitable for inclusion in email and other messaging systems.

Usage

• Configure Your Gateways

  You have to enable the REST Command API in your Gateways. You should have a user account on the Gateways that support password authentication and is limited to data permissions, i.e. a read-only account. How to do this can be found in the following documentation:

  • REST Service 🔗
  • Authentication 🔗

• Install dv2email and geneos (optional) somewhere in your execution path (or use the full path to where you install them)

  Next configure your dv2email YAML files:

  • dv2email.yaml in the working directory of each Gateway

    This configuration file (see details below) should contain all customisations for the Gateway and the format of the emails you want to send.

  • ${HOME}/.config/geneos/dv2email.yaml - where ${HOME} is the home directory of the user running the Gateway(s)

    This configuration file should contain common configuration that applies across all Gateways and also email server configuration and credentials, as appropriate. If this file contains credentials, even when AES256 encrypted, should be only readable by the Gateway user; that is chmod 0400 dv2email.yaml.

• Store credentials (optional)

  Next, optionally store any credentials in the user's geneos managed credentials.yaml file using geneos login. This is not necessary if you embed credentials in the dv2email.yaml files.

• Test

  You should now be able to test your configuration. You can do this by simulating a minimal alert on the command line:

  cd $(geneos home MyGateway)
  _VARIABLEPATH='//dataview[(@name="SOMEDATAVIEWNAME")]' dv2email
  

  Replace SOMEDATAVIEWNAME above with the name of a Dataview on your Gateway that is likely to match exactly one Dataview. If it matches more than one Dataview then in the test template all matching Dataviews will be included in the email.

  If the program returns with no output then it has succeeded in sending an email, otherwise review the errors and resolve them as needed. Most issues will be related to authentication, either to the Gateways or to the email server.

• Update Templates

  Update your templates to suite you requirements. The built-in template produces output which says clearly that it is for testing and should be edited for local requirements. The templates (there is both an HTML and a plain text template) embedded into the binary are identical to the ones in the example configuration file included alongside the binary.

• Use

  If you are happy with the results of your testing then you should be able to create and Action or Effect that is simply the program, like this:

  dv2email
  

  While there are some command line flags you should not need to use them in normal operation as all the details are either in the configuration file(s) and the environment variables set by Geneos.

How It Works

The program has been designed to run under a Geneos Gateway and process the standard environment variables that the Gateway sets when running an Action from a Rule or an Effect from an Alerting hierarchy. The precise list of values differs based on which mechanism is used and also the data item that the Action or Effect is run against. Details are documented here:

• Actions 🔗
• Effects 🔗

The primary difference for dv2email is that when running from an Alert and Effect some of the email headers are automatically set based on the Notification set-up. dv2email will recognise these and process them as expected. For Actions the To, From, Subject items must be set. You can define the defaults in the configuration files and override them using userdata functions in the Rule Block, e.g. (in Geneos):

if value > 100 then
    userdata "_TO" "manager@example.com"
    userdata "_SUBJECT" "HELP! It's Broken!"
    run "dv2email Action"
else
...

The contents of the email are assembled from the two templates (text and HTML) and any image attachments. The resulting HTML is also run through an "inliner" to ensure that any CSS defined in the HTML <head> section is inlined to the tags that need the settings as many email clients (GMail and others) only support a simple HTML5/CSS3 format. If you wnt to save data then you can disable this inlining with the --inline-css=false command line flag.

Configuration Reference

File locations

The dv2email program will look in three directories for a dv2email.yaml file and merge the contents in the following order (last version of a value "wins"):

1. /etc/geneos - a global configuration directory for geneos. These are general, global settings and in many instances this directory does not exist.
2. ${HOME}/.config/geneos - the user's geneos configuration directory. This is the user running the program, which again will be typically the Gateway user.
3. Working directory of process - i.e. where you are when you run it, not the installation directory (pwd). This is normally the same as the working directory of the Gateway running it.

Additionally there is support for "defaults" files for all the above. You can have dv2email.defaults.yaml files in any of the above directories and these are read before the main configurations but after built-in defaults. They make a good option for complex templates that would otherwise pollute the visibility of other configuration options.

Note: If the program is renamed then the base name of all the files above is also changed. e.g. if you rename the program dv2mailserver then the configuration files that the program searches for will be dv2mailserver.yaml etc.

Configuration Options

The configuration is in three parts; Gateway connectivity, EMail server connectivity and everything else. These are described below along with the defaults (except the templates which can be quite large):

• gateway

  This section is for the connectivity to the Gateway REST API. If dv2email is running alongside the Gateway then you probably only need to configure the username and password.

  • host - default localhost

    The hostname or IP address of the Gateway.

  • port - default 7038

    The port that the Gateway accepts REST Commands on. The default is 7038 regardless of the use-tls setting below. This is intentional as the REST Command API will normally only accept commands on a secure port.

  • use-tls - default true

    Use a secure connection. This is the default for the REST Command API when enabled.

  • allow-insecure - default true

    This setting controls the checking of the Gateways server certificate and default to true as most Gateways will use private certificates.

    In a future release the program may be able to automatically check against the certificate chain created and maintained by the geneos program.

  • username - no default

  • password - no default

    The username and password used to authenticate to the Gateway REST Command API. The password should normally be AES256 encrypted using Geneos formatted secure passwords but enclosed in cordial expandable format. These can be generated using geneos aes password.

  • name - no default

    If no username and password are configured then the program tries to locate credentials using the value of name - typically the gateway name - that have been created and stored using geneos login. The credential used must be prefixed with gateway: to the login command. e.g.

    geneos login gateway:MyGateway -u readonly
    

• email

  • smtp - default localhost

    The hostname or IP of the SMTP server.

  • port - default 25

    The port of the SMTP server. While the default is 25 most modern SMTP server will be listening on ports 465 or 587 depending on their configured services, especially when using TLS to protect the connection.

  • use-tls - default default

    By default the the SMTP connection is made using opportunistic TLS, i.e. TLS is used if the server advertises STARTTLS but otherwise the email is sent in the clear. The other options are force and none which do what the names suggest.

    Note that is it not possible to ignore server certificate errors for SMTP. This is intentional.

  • username - no default

  • password - no default

    The username and password to use for the SMTP connection. The password should ne AES256 encrypted as for the Gateway password above.

    If no username or password are given then the SMTP connection is attempted without authentication.

    In a future release there may be support for fetching these values from the cordial credentials store but for now they must be in one of the dv2email configuration files.

  • from - no default

  • to - no default

  • subject - default Geneos Alert

• column-filter - default from Environment Variable __COLUMNS (two underscores)

• row-filter - default from Environment Variable __ROWS (two underscores)

• headline-filter - default from Environment Variable __HEADLINES (two underscores)

• first-column - default from Environment Variable _FIRSTCOLUMN (single underscore)

• row-order - default first column ascending

  These five configuration settings influence the way that Dataview cells are passed into the templates.

  The three filter items all work the same way but have some difference depending on the dimension of data they apply to. The configuration formats all follow the same pattern:

  column-filter:
    pattern1: [ item1, item2, item3 ]
    pattern2: [ item4, item5, item6 ]
    '*': [ other, values ]
  

  The pattern on the left is matched against the Dataview name and for all the patterns that match the longest match is selected. This means you can have specific configuration for one Dataview and then more general defaults for others. The pattern matching is not a regular expression but the simpler shell style file patterns known as globbing. The supported patterns are documented in the Go path.Match 🔗 docs. The final pattern above, the catch-all wildcard must be enclosed in quotes for YAML to be valid.

  Once the list of items is matched they are then applied to the data set in the following ways:

  • rows - each item is matched against the rowname using the same globbing rules as above. The total set of rows matched is passed to the template in the Rows slice. The order of Rows is further refined by the row-order item (see below).

  • columns - each item is matched against the columns names (except the first column, see below) and the order of the columns is determined by how they matched the items.

    The first column, the rowname, is special and is always included. If the program is called from the Gateway on a Dataview table cell then the environment variable _FIRSTCOLUMN is set and this is used instead of the literal rowname. The configuration item first-column can be used, with the same syntax as for the filters above, to define the name on a per-Dataview basis.

  • headlines - Headline cells are treated in a similar way to columns and for all the patterns that match the Dataview name, each item is matched against all the available headlines and all that match are passed into the template. Headlines are not ordered in anyway.

  Rows can be ordered by one column, including the name of the first column (or rowname if none is defined) using a similar pattern match to the filters above. Only the first item is used and it must be an exact match for a column name followed by an option '+' or '-' to indicate ascending or descending order, respectively.

• images

  A list of image files to embed into the resulting email. The name (on the left) is used as the href cid value. e.g.

  images:
    logo1.png: /path/to/my/logo.png
    alert.png: /path/to/another/image.png
  

  In a future release it may be possible to refer to images using URLs or other "expandable" formats but for now they must be file paths and if relative they must be accessibkle from the working directory of the process.

• text-template

  A template in Go text/template format to be used to generate the plain text to be used as the text/plain alternative part in the email. This part of the email is not normally visible in modern email clients but it is used for assistive text readers and other accessibility tools and should be used to describe the contents of the email.

• html-template

  A template in Go html/template format to be used to generate the HTML to be used as the text/html alternative part of the email.

  The data available to the template (and the text template above) is details in the dv2email.yaml file.

  For both template types it is possible to include the contents of a file or a URL using "expandable" syntax, like this:

  text-template: ${https://myserver.example.com/files/txt.gotmpl}
  html-template: ${file:/path/to/template.gotmpl}