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Notifications overview

The notifications feature helps you stay informed about important system events in real time. With timely updates, you can monitor resources proactively, respond quickly to issues, and gain better insights into system health and status.

Key features

  • Real-time alerts: Get immediate notifications for significant events, such as health status changes of resources.

  • Customizable filters: Use Common Expression Language (CEL) to define filters, ensuring that notifications are tailored to your specific needs and only relevant events trigger alerts.

  • Integration support: Easily integrate notifications with external tools for streamlined incident management and communication

Notification Types

  • Health status notifications: These alerts notify users about the health of cert-manager certificates and cert-manager issuers within the cluster.

    • The system monitors these resources, and if any remain in an unhealthy state for a period that may impact operations, a notification will be sent. This approach helps prevent unnecessary noise by only triggering alerts for prolonged issues.

    • Notifications for restored healthy states are sent almost immediately after recovery.

  • Expiring certificate notifications: The system checks daily for certificates that are nearing expiration, based on three predefined thresholds. Notifications are sent for each certificate approaching expiration, ensuring timely action to avoid service disruptions.

How it works

  1. Create an external integration: Users can integrate notifications with the following external tools to streamline incident management and communication:

    • PagerDuty: For incident management and alert escalation.

    • Zoom Team Chat: For collaboration and real-time alerting within team channels

  2. Once an integration is created, users can configure the routing settings to control which notifications are triggered.

    The routing configuration for cert-manager notifications uses CEL expressions to filter events based on specific criteria, ensuring that only relevant notifications are sent. For more information, see Event Notification types.

Note

You can also set up notifications for email for direct communication of important notifications, and by setting up custom webhooks.

For more information on setting up certificate notifications for these methods, see Set up certification expiration notifications.

Conclusion

The notifications feature helps you stay aware of system health and respond proactively to potential issues. With customizable filters, seamless integration support, and detailed payloads, you can tailor notifications to meet your needs while ensuring reliability.

Next steps

Explore more: Learn about advanced filtering options and how to refine your notification strategy. For more information, see Event Notification types.

Integration guides: Check out our guides on integrating notifications with external systems. For more information, see Receive notifications in PagerDuty and Receive notifications in Zoom team Chat.