OpenShift 4.4 - Easy Access: Alerts and the Notification Drawer

OpenShift does a good job of detecting hiccups and fixing them, but occasionally a cluster administrator needs to take an action in response to an event in the console. Often these actions are routine and expected like providing a manual approval for an update, but sometimes things go wrong. When that happens, it’s crucial to know about the problem as soon as possible to avoid costly incidents. Fortunately, OpenShift 4.4 includes a notification drawer feature to aggregate important information and provide suggested actions when possible. When combined with the suite of pre-configured cluster alerts that come packaged with OpenShift, the notification drawer is a powerful tool for addressing situations that require your attention.

Notification Drawer

When you sign into an OpenShift 4.4 console, you’ll notice a new bell-shaped icon in the masthead. Clicking on it will show the notification drawer. Inside are a number of expandable sections that can appear for different types of information.

Drawer Contents

The first section you’ll see when you open the notification drawer is for critical alerts. These are reserved for incidents that are likely having an impact on your customers or may work against your service level agreements. Critical alerts should be addressed as quickly as possible using tools such as the new metrics dashboards to find the source of the problem.

The most common type of notification that you are likely to see are non-critical alerts found under the other alerts section. These are mostly warnings about unusual cluster states that require action in order to resolve. One unique example is the “AlertmanagerReceiversNotConfigured” alert. This alert serves as a reminder to configure your alertmanager. In this case, the notification includes a link directly to the configuration page, saving time.

From time to time, you may see other messages appear in the notification drawer. An available cluster update, for example, will show up in a separate section of the drawer with options to view more information or to start the update.

Targeted Information

The new notification drawer is part of our effort to increase access to useful data and improve the troubleshooting experience in OpenShift. As we add more functionality to the console, expect to see more kinds of actions appear in the notification drawer that make maintaining your cluster a simpler and more pleasant experience. To try out these new features, visit the newly revamped Try OpenShift site to get instant access to a cluster.

If you have features that you’d like to see in the notification drawer let us know here or take this brief 3-minute survey.