Sending Windows service alerts as email

This page contains information on how to configure Butler to send email alerts when Windows services stop or start.

What’s this?

These config settings are specific to the email alert destination.
They are used in addition to the general Windows Service monitoring settings in Butler.serviceMonitor.

How it works

The sent emails are created from template files using the Handlebars templating engine.

The template files are located in the Butler.emailNotification.<alertType>.bodyFileDirectory directory, with the actual file name specified in Butler.emailNotification.<alertType>.htmlTemplateFile.

The template files can contain Handlebars expressions to insert values from the alert data.
The available values are:

Value	Description
`{{host}}`	The hostname of the server where the service is running
`{{serviceStatus}}`	The status of the service, e.g. `RUNNING` or `STOPPED`
`{{servicePrevStatus}}`	The previous status of the service, e.g. `RUNNING` or `STOPPED`
`{{serviceName}}`	The name of the service as defined in Windows
`{{serviceDisplayName}}`	The display name of the service as defined in Windows. Can sometimes be a bit more human readable than the serviceName.
`{{serviceFriendlyName}}`	The display name of the service as defined in the Butler config file. Used to give the service a good name when both serviceName and serviceDisplayName are unsuitable for use in for example Grafana dashboards.
`{{serviceStartType}}`	The startup mode of the service, e.g. `Automatic` or `Manual`
`{{serviceExePath}}`	The path to the executable of the service

Settings in config file

---
Butler:
  ...
  ...
  emailNotification: 
    serviceStopped:
      rateLimit: 30                   # Min seconds between emails for a given service. Defaults to 5 minutes.
      priority: high                  # high/normal/low
      subject: '❌ Windows service stopped on host {{host}}: "{{serviceDisplayName}}"'
      bodyFileDirectory: path/to/email_templates/email_templates
      htmlTemplateFile: service-stopped
      fromAdress: Qlik Sense (no-reply) <qliksense-noreply@mydomain.com>
      recipients:
        - <Email address 1>
        - <Email address 2>
    serviceStarted:
      rateLimit: 30                   # Min seconds between emails for a given service. Defaults to 5 minutes.
      priority: high                  # high/normal/low
      subject: '✅ Windows service started on host {{host}}: "{{serviceDisplayName}}"'
      bodyFileDirectory: path/to/email_templates/email_templates
      htmlTemplateFile: service-started
      fromAdress: Qlik Sense (no-reply) <qliksense-noreply@mydomain.com>
      recipients:
        - <Email address 1>
        - <Email address 2>
    smtp:                                             # Email server settings. See https://nodemailer.com/smtp/ for details on the meaning of these fields.
      host: <FQDN or IP or email server, e.g. smtp.gmail.com>
      port: <port on which SMTP server is listening>
      secure: true                                    # true/false
      tls:
        serverName:                                   # If specified the serverName field will be used for TLS verification instead of the host field.
        ignoreTLS: false
        requireTLS: true
        rejectUnauthorized: false
      auth:
        enable: true
        user: <Username, email address etc>
        password: <your-secret-password>
  ...  
  ...

Last modified 2023-06-13: Update docs to Butler v9.0 (6ae1377)