turn off monit text alerts at night

Question

I have monit running 24/7/365 and sending alerts to an e-mail address and text messages to a phone equally.

However I would now like to stop the phone text msgs at night so they don't wake me up.

I can't just silence my phone because we are on call for any relatives that might need us in an emergency.

I will figure out later how to get "unable to restart server" text messages at all times.

I have this in my monitrc file:

set alert [email protected]
set alert [email protected]

So I would like to turn off the vtext.com alert by adding something like the below (that works in the individual service "check process" files)

not every "* 23,0-6 * * *"

Any ideas on how to implement that?

Thanks, Ron

Answer 1

You can "unmonitor" the services outside of core operational hours.

I worked in an environment where the main systems only ran in production for part of the day. At the beginning of the business day, we would start the systems and Monit services via cron.

################################################################################
# Start any core services on this machine
################################################################################
0    6 * * 1-5 $BIN/monit -g servers start all

At the close of the day, we'd stop certain services and unmonitor other services.

################################################################################
# Shutdown Brazzers
################################################################################
01  15 * * 1-5 $BIN/monit unmonitor `/bin/hostname`
50  23 * * 0-5 $BIN/monit -g servers stop all
51  23 * * 0-5 $BIN/monit -g base  stop all
52  23 * * 0-5 $BIN/monit stop all

You could do the same with something like the following if you're not concerned about actually responding to the alerts:

monit unmonitor SERVICE_NAME

Of course, one could say that you're not monitoring effectively if you're getting too much noise. That takes a different approach, but what's the point in getting alerts if you're going to ignore them?

Answer 2

Monit itself does not have a facility by which you can tell it to stop sending alerts while still monitoring a service. The way I would solve the problem is by shifting to the email system the responsibility of determining whether I should be alerted. What I would do is:

1. Create a mailbox that is the direct recipient of the alerts.

2. Set a .forward which is a script that checks whether to forward the email to the final destination depending on what the time of day is.

ewwhite's solution works only for some rather narrow use-cases where the sysadmin who has set up monit is okay with Monit a) not sending alerts during a certain period of time and also b) not doing anything about the service that is sending alerts at undesirable times. Because that's what "unmonitor" means: yes, Monit will stop sending alerts but it will also stop doing anything about the service. If it dies during the night, Monit won't restart it.