Support Notification - Getting Started

Support Notifications is one of the EdgeX Support Services. It is needed for applications that require notifications or alerts to be sent to the users. For solutions that do not require notifications, it is possible to use the EdgeX framework without support notifications.

Running Services with Support Notifications

The simplest way to run all the required services is to use the Compose Builder tool from a terminal window.

1. Clone https://github.com/edgexfoundry/edgex-compose/tree/main

2. Change to the compose-builder folder

3. Run the services

   make run no-secty ds-virtual
   

   This runs, in non-secure mode, all the standard EdgeX services, including support notifications, along with the Device Virtual.

Running Services without Support Notifications

The simplest way to run all the required services is to use the Compose Builder tool from a terminal window.

1. Clone https://github.com/edgexfoundry/edgex-compose/tree/main
2. Change to the compose-builder folder
3. Generate a compose file

   make gen no-secty ds-virtual
   

4. Remove support-notifications from the compose file and resolve any depends on for support notifications.
5. Run the compose file.

   make up
   

This runs, in non-secure mode, all the standard EdgeX services, except for support notifications, along with the Device Virtual.

Terminology

Notifications are informative, whereas Alerts are typically of a more important, critical, or urgent nature, possibly requiring immediate action.

This diagram shows the high-level architecture of the notifications service. On the left side, the APIs are provided for other microservices, on-box applications, and off-box applications to use. The APIs could be in REST, AMQP, MQTT, or any standard application protocols.

This diagram is drawn by diagrams.net with the source file EdgeX_SupportingServicesAlertsArchitecture.xml

On the right side, the notifications receiver could be a person or an application system on Cloud or in a server room. By invoking the Subscription RESTful interface to subscribe the specific types of notifications, the receiver obtains the appropriate notifications through defined receiving channels when events occur. The receiving channels include SMS message, e-mail, REST callback, AMQP, MQTT, and so on.

When the notifications service receives notifications from any interface, the notifications are passed to the Notifications Handler internally. The Notifications Handler persists the received notifications first, and passes them to the Distribution Coordinator.

When the Distribution Coordinator receives a notification, it first queries the Subscription database to get receivers who need this notification and their receiving channel information. According to the channel information, the Distribution Coordinator passes this notification to the corresponding channel senders. Then, the channel senders send out the notifications to the subscribed receivers.

Workflow

Normal/Minor Notifications

When a client requests a notification to be sent with "NORMAL" or "MINOR" status, the notification is immediately sent to its receivers via the Distribution Coordinator, and the status is updated to "PROCESSED".

Critical Notifications

Notifications with "CRITICAL" status are also sent immediately. When encountering any error during sending critical notification, an individual resend task is scheduled, and each transmission record persists. After exceeding the configurable limit (resend limit), the service escalates the notification and create a new notification to notify particular receivers of the escalation subscription (name = "ESCALATION") of the failure.