Notifications

What is a "Notification"

Notifications are messages to be delivered to the user as a result of an outage event. Notifications are associated with users through watches.

When an event occurs for an outage that a user is watching, zero or more notifications may be generated for the user.

Note that a user may watch an outage in one of 3 ways:

• Directly - this means the user watches the outage
• Directly, Through Service - this means that the user is watching a service (Ci) that is associated with the outage
• Indirectly - this means that the user is watching a service (CI) that is an ancestor of a service (Ci) associated with the outage. Because the watched service is an ancestor, this means that an outage on any descendant of the service may create an outage on the watched service. (TODO: initially, all outages on any descendant will be assumed to impact a service, this needs further development and review).

Using the user preferences, the user indicates the type of events for which the user wishes to receive notifications. The user will receive one or more notifications for any event the user is interested in that is associated with an outage the user is watching.

Terminology

Notifications that require further action, either from the application or user, before they can be considered to have been delivered to the users are referred to as unnotified. Notifications that required no further action from the user or the application are referred to as notified.

Types of Notifications

The Outages application presently implements two types of notifications:

• On line notifications - these are messages that appear as a flash style message that the user sees when connecting to the application using a browser. All users automatically receive notifications for the types of events specified in their preferences. The application considers the notification complete (notified) when the user has marked the notification as read. Only unread notifications are displayed in the flash.
• Email notifications - as the name implies, these are email sent to the user. Each user specifies in their preferences, whether they wish to receive email notifications, as well, whether they wish to receive individual notifications or if they wish to receive a daily email summarizing notifications to date. The application considers the notification complete (notified) when an email message has been sent to the user containing the content of the notification.