Administration - Configuring the Alerting Service

From Semaphore 5.8 it is possible to receive alerts when models are published. See Alerting within Semaphore Studio for detail how to interact with this in the KMM application.

For this functionality to work, the alerting service within the Semaphore Studio application must be configured correctly.

This configuration is done in the file

<<Studio installation>>/alerting/conf/application.properties

(<<Studio installation>> by default being /opt/semapahore on Linux and C:\Program Files\Smartlogic\Studio on Windows.)

You must configure the connection to a mail server here. We are using the Quarkus mailer extension to carry out the mailing, so the full documentation is available at mailer-reference#configuring-the-smtp-credentials but the following example should help.

quarkus.mailer.from=<<The from address for the Semaphore alerts>>
quarkus.mailer.auth-methods="DIGEST-MD5 CRAM-SHA256 CRAM-SHA1 CRAM-MD5 PLAIN LOGIN"
quarkus.mailer.host=<<The mailer host>>
quarkus.mailer.port=465
quarkus.mailer.ssl=true
quarkus.mailer.username=<<The user name for accessing the mailer server>>

You can provide the mailer password in plain text in this file, but it is preferred to store it in a more secure location. To do this specify the following three parameters

quarkus.mailer.password=${mail-password}
quarkus.file.vault-config-source.keystore-path=<<Path to cache file>>
quarkus.file.vault-config-source.keystore-secret=<<Password for keystore>>

The ${mail-password} should be left as it is - it is a reference to an entry in the keystore. The cache file will be created. This should be created in a location and with permissions so that it is not available to users other than of this service.

To create this file, run the command

keytool -importpass -alias mail-password -keystore <<Path to cache file>> -storepass <<Password for keystore>> -storetype PKCS12

(keytool will have been provided as part of your java installation). You will be prompted for the value of the mail password.

Once this configuration is complete, restart the altering service. (You do not need to restart all the Semaphore services.)

If you are having issues, you can add the parameter

quarkus.log.level=DEBUG

and more details will written to the <code><<Studio installation>>/alerting/logs/service-stdout.log<code> file. However, once you’ve sorted out your problems, remove this file to prevent log file bloat.