Per Project Settings for Notifications

This blog is a brief description of one of the enhancements from our recent release in May 2023. This feature was a frequently requested enhancement by our customers and it provides them with fine grained configuration for email notifications at a project level.

The Rafay platform acts as a single pane of glass providing a centralized view of all clusters and applications spanning the organization. Customers have had the option for over two years to leverage the Visibility & Monitoring service for centralized monitoring, alerting and notifications. This is a turnkey integration available for customers when they enable the visibility & monitoring managed add-on in their cluster blueprint.

The Visibility & Monitoring service can be leveraged to automatically generate and aggregate Alerts centrally for developers and operations personnel in their Orgs. In addition to centrally aggregated alerts, users have always had the option to optionally enable the platform to proactively send email notification when alerts are generated. To do this, administrators would specify email addresses for recipients that need to receive email notifications proactively everytime something needs immediate attention. Read on more about the enhancement below.

flowchart LR
    subgraph c1[Cluster]
    direction TB
        bp1[Cluster <br>Blueprint] -->
        vis1[Visibility & <br>Monitoring <br> Managed Add-on]
    end

    subgraph c2[Cluster]
    direction TB
        bp2[Cluster <br>Blueprint] -->
        vis2[Visibility & <br>Monitoring <br> Managed Add-on]
    end

    vis1-->rafay
    vis2-->rafay

    subgraph rafay[Rafay Controller]
    direction TB
        notifier[Visibility & Monitoring <br> Service]
        proja[Project A]-->notifier
        projb[Project B]-->notifier
    end

    rafay --> |Notification|admin[Administrators]

    classDef box fill:#fff,stroke:#000,stroke-width:1px,color:#000;
    classDef spacewhite fill:#ffffff,stroke:#fff,stroke-width:0px,color:#000
    class c1,bp1,vis1,c2,bp2,vis2,notifier,tsdb,admin box

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Per Project Settings

Although the email based notifications at an Org level are really useful, it was no longer scalable because our customers have expanded their deployments to support 100s of projects in their Rafay Orgs. At this scale, a centralized team is no longer capable of dealing with the deluge of email based notifications from 100s of projects. With this enhancement, we have made the following possible:

Platform teams can now offload the receipt and processing of notifications to downstream users in a project.

This allows the specific application teams to react quickly when they receive these notifications instead of having to wait for the centralized platform team to review and process it.

Users in a project can customize what scenarios they would like to receive notifications for.

For example, an application team may only want to be notified if there are issues with the pods.

With this enhancement, the architecture diagram below is what it would look like for a typical Rafay Org.

flowchart LR
    subgraph c1[Cluster]
    direction TB
        bp1[Cluster <br>Blueprint] -->
        vis1[Visibility & <br>Monitoring <br> Managed Add-on]
    end

    subgraph c2[Cluster]
    direction TB
        bp2[Cluster <br>Blueprint] -->
        vis2[Visibility & <br>Monitoring <br> Managed Add-on]
    end

    vis1-->rafay
    vis2-->rafay

    subgraph rafay[Rafay Controller]
    direction TB
        notifier[Visibility & Monitoring <br> Service]
        proja[Project A]-->notifier
        projb[Project B]-->notifier

    end

    rafay --> |Notifications|proja_admin[Project A <br> Users]
    rafay --> |Notifications|projb_admin[Project B <br> Users]

    classDef box fill:#fff,stroke:#000,stroke-width:1px,color:#000;
    classDef spacewhite fill:#ffffff,stroke:#fff,stroke-width:0px,color:#000
    class c1,bp1,vis1,c2,bp2,vis2,notifier,tsdb,admin box

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