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Custom Console Messages

The AppLogic WebUI dashboard displays a number of informational and cautionary warnings about the state of the system, but it's not difficult to place custom messages tailored to your function as well. This document gives some information about how to exploit the message system.

The grid level messages are shown on the dashboard.

The messages shown can be roughly categorized into two types: Informational (black type) and important ones (red type with the Important designator).
The source of these messages are files in the /etc/applogic/messages.d directory.

Each file in this directory will result in a message provided the filename and content are in the correct format.

File Format

The file requires the following filename format to be recognized as an AppLogic message:

Filename

The filename begins with a 3 digit number a title and an optional .important suffix to tag it as an important message. For example
020_grid_progress500_3tctlmon_report.important.

Content

The message content is enclosed in the message{} . The content and keywords are arranged between the curly braces, each keyword appears on a separate line.
message { keyword1= value keyword2= value keyword3 = value text_strings [ fmt = "Message text" fmt = "More message text" fmt = "Still more message text" ] }
Here are some keywords found in the message files.

• ID – the numeric and textual portion of the filename.
• Severity – info or alert
• Tstamp – time in epoch time (unix time). The actual time displayed is taken from the timestamp on the message file when it is saved. This is not used to date the message in the dashboard.
• Text_strings – message content in the form shown above. The "fmt" keyword defines strings composing the entire message. Subsequent fmt statements are appended, so make sure you apply leading or trailing spaces in the message appropriately to that words don't run together.

Application

You can generate a files of this type and place it in the location and inject a message on the console message list. From the controller, you can redirect messages of the day or performance information. From the BFC, you can use a secure file transfer like SCP to move messages from the BFC to the location to provide messages from the MSP to the customer. With clever scripting you can automate message building and delivery to dashboards of any grid supported by the BFC you are using.

Variables

Variables can be included in messages as follows.

message
{
id = 500_3tctlmon_srv_time
severity = alert
tstamp = 1359519246
text_strings
[
fmt = "The time on the following servers are no longer in sync with the grid controller: %s. Appliances running on these servers may report the incorrect time.", arg1="srv1, srv2, srv3, srv4"
fmt = " Please contact technical support."
]
}
"Arg1=" provides the value for the embedded variable %s, which requires a string. %t accepts epoch time.