Notifications

Introduction

WPCloudDeploy V4.5.0 introduced a new screen called “Notifications”. This screen contains user friendly notices based on activity from various parts of the plugin. But the most useful are those created by callbacks – data pushed from the server to the plugin at regular intervals.

These notices include:

Power events (server start up, server shutdown)
MONIT alerts.
Server restart needed
Backup start and end
When malware has been detected (if Maldet is installed)

Over time additional alerts will be added.

As of V4.6.0, these notices can be pushed to any interested party via the following channels:

Email
Slack
Zapier

Features

Each administrator can can choose where to receive push alerts
Administrators can restrict the servers and sites for which they will receive push alerts.
Administrators can set up multiple destinations for different types of alerts. For example, low priority servers and sites can have their alerts sent to emails while higher priority servers can be pushed to slack and zapier.
A short-code to allow users to setup alerts using the front-end.

Setting Up An Alert Profile in WP-Admin

You can add an alert profile as follows:

Go to the SERVER NOTIFICATIONS->USER NOTIFICATIONS screen (note that SERVER NOTIFICATIONS is a new menu top-level WordPress option in wp-admin)
Click the New User Notification button at the top of the screen.
Provide a name for the profile and the fill out the rest of the fields.
Note: If you leave servers, sites and other selectors blank, you will receive all alerts for those types of items. For example, if you do not make a selection under servers then you’ll receive notifications for all servers for which you have access.
Click the UPDATE button to save the alert profile.

Setting Up An Alert Profile On The Front End

You can allow other users to setup alert profiles on the front-end.

First you have to create a new WP page with the wpcd_user_notifications_form shortcode.

Then your users can navigate to the page to setup their own alerts.

The short-code will render a page that looks like this:

Overlap With Monit

When you set Monit, you’re allowed to set up email notifications. If that’s all you need then there is no need to set up additional alerts using the plugin notifications screen. But, if you want to send those Monit alerts to other places such as Slack or Zapier you can now do that.

Repeated Notifications

You will get some alerts every day. For example, if you have a server that needs to be restarted, a notification is logged every day. So if you’re receiving those types of alerts, you will receive one every day until the server has been restarted.

There are other times where you might receive multiple alerts for the same event over a two hour period. This happens because we send a notification to our plugin every time a package is updated on the server. Unfortunately, Linux will run updates in a way that cause these alerts to get triggered multiple times instead of just at the start and end of the process. We do not have a good way around this right now short of removing notifications to WPCD when a package has been updated. But those notifications contain valuable information that we need to know about – in particular if a server needs to be restarted. So we cannot remove it.

Notes

There is no guarantee that alerts will be received in the order they were sent. It is possible that you will receive later alerts first followed by earlier alerts. You can blame email or the order in which Zapier triggers their events .

Availability

This feature is available in WPCD Version 4.6.0 or later.