Contacts¶
Notifications regarding monitors going up or down are dispatched to Contacts.
A contact isn't necessarily human and a single human does not necessarily equal a single contact. A single contact is of a specific type (such as an email contact or a contact to send SMS notifications to). As with monitors, maintenance windows or dynamic rules, contacts can be tagged as well and therefore leverage Argus' tag-based configuration philosophy.
Supported Types¶
As of today, the following contact types are supported:
- SMS
- Phone Call
- Telegram
- Pushover
Some contact types are only available as paid feature to customers on the Essential or Professional plans.
Once a contact has been created with a certain contact type, it can not be changed anymore. You can however change the contact's notification destination, such as the email address for an email contact or the mobile phone number for a SMS contact.
Before a contact can be used to receive monitoring notifications, the contact needs to be confirmed. This either happens by clicking a link that is being sent to the contact, by typing a numeric code that is being dispatched to a phone number or by otherwise providing API keys or authentication data that indicates that the human recipient behind a certain contact is willingly and able to receive monitoring notifications.
Email¶
Email contacts receive a confirmation email after creation containing a URL to visit to confirm the subscription to monitoring notifications. All subsequently dispatched emails to that contact include an unsubscribe link at the bottom of each email as well as an unsubscribe header that most email clients are using to render an Unsubscribe button in their UI.
SMS¶
SMS contacts receive an SMS containing a numeric code to enter on the contact's detail page in order to verify and activate it.
Phone Notification
A notification dispatched via SMS to a contact counts as Phone Notification towards the monthly included phone notification quota and can consume additional phone notification credits if the included quota is exhausted during the ongoing calendar month.
Visit our information on Billing & Quotas to learn more about the concept of phone notifications.
Phone Call¶
Phone call contacts also receive an SMS containing a numeric code to enter on the contact's detail page in order to verify and activate it. This implies that the phone number provided for a phone call contact, needs to be able to receive SMS in order to work with Argus.
Phone Notification
A notification dispatched via phone call to a contact counts as Phone Notification towards the monthly included phone notification quota and can consume additional phone notification credits if the included quota is exhausted during the ongoing calendar month.
Visit our information on Billing & Quotas to learn more about the concept of phone notifications.
To avoid abuse, there are certain country codes that are not functional with Argus, such as for high-risk countries or for satellite phone networks such as Inmarsat or Iridium.
Any phone call notification will attempt to call a contact for a total of 60 seconds before it will stop trying.
Telegram¶
You can receive monitoring notifications on Telegram either via a private message directly to your personal Telegram account or within a group. The latter option is more flexible as it allows you to manage who can see the notifications directly via the Telegram group management features.
In order to receive notifications via Telegram, you have to either contact the @rescaledArgusBot or add it to your group.
On your contact's detail page, you will find a code that needs to be provided to the bot using the /link command, followed by the code. That way, the bot knows which Argus contact it's talking to and which notifications you should receive.
If you no longer wish to receive notifications you can disable the contact from Telegram by using the /unlink command without any additional argument. This will disable the contact and require the Argus account owner to link it again before the underlying contact is able to receive notifications again.
Pushover¶
The application Pushover is commonly used in the IT landscape to dispatch real-time push notifications to end users, especially towards smartphones, although over time, Pushover was made available for desktop users as well.
Paid Application Required
Pushover is not free software. It requires a one-time purchase in the app store of your choice. You can then create a Pushover account and use the application on multiple of your devices as well as access their Web UI on the browser.
When creating a new Pushover contact, you need to provide your User Key which you can either find in your Pushover application on your smartphone or in the Pushover Web UI in the top right corner of the dashboard.
You can also configure priorities as well as sounds for all notifications that are dispatched towards that contact. The choice of priority has an influence on whether you e.g. receive an audible notification at night (or when you have do-not-disturb mode enabled on your phone).
Receiving Notifications¶
On a contact's detail page, you will not be able to configure for which monitors you want to receive notifications. In order to specify which notifications a contact should receive, you either need to either
- go to a certain monitor and directly assign a contact to it or
- go to your dynamic rules and link the contact to it after you created it.
Pausing¶
You can pause and resume notifications toward a contact. This can be manually done on the contact overview page as well as on a contact's detail page.
While a contact is paused, it will not receive any notification whatsoever until it's manually resumed again. A paused contact is highlighted with a red indicator across the Argus web UI to make you aware that you're looking at a contact that won't get any notifications right now.