Configuration and creation of mail notifications in Proxmox VE

There are some possibilities with WebUI or command line to adjust email notifications for the safe use of Proxmox VE. This article explains the current possibilities for configuration and testing of these notifications under Proxmox VE 8.1.

General information

In the standard settings of Proxmox VE, all emails will be sent to the email address of the root user root@pam. This can be seen at Datacenter -> Permissions -> Users.

Datacenter notifications

Since Proxmox VE 8.1,the notifications can be configured globally via the datacenter level.

Notification targets

There are three configurable notification targets:

• Gotify Server
• SMTP
• Sendmail (Default)

New features are the Gotify (notification server) and the opportunity to send mails via a stated SMTP account (inclusive SSL/TSL and user/password authentication). The corresponding graphic is Notification Targets in PVE 8.1.

Notification matchers

If you have configured one or more notification targets, you can also define notification matchers. Based on these rules, emails are only sent to certain targets depending on the settings. For example, you could set that notifications are sent from Monday to Friday to a support@company.de and on the weekend to a standby@company.de. Thanks to Regex and diverse filters, there are a lot of opportunities to send the notifications as desired. In the graphic "Notification Targets in PVE 8.1", it is set that notifications of the type fencing and the severity Warning or Error are sent to a specific notification target on Saturday and Sunday between midnight and 11:59 p.m.

Sending of test notification

In the data center notifications, a test e-mail can be sent to the respective target by selecting a notification target and clicking on “Test”. See graphic Test-Notification in PVE 8.1.

• 
  Notification Targets in PVE 8.1
• 
  Test-Notification in PVE 8.1
• 
  Notification Matchers in PVE 8.1

Overview notifications

An overview of all events with email notification can be found in the documentation at Proxmox VE :

Event	Type	Severity	Metadata fields (in addition to type)
System updates available	package-updates	info	hostname
Cluster node fenced	fencing	error	hostname
Storage replication failed	replication	error	-
Backup finished	vzdump	info (error on failure)	hostname
Mail for root	system-mail	unknown	-

With the corresponding explanation:

Field name	Description
type	type of the notifcation
hostname	hostname, including domain (e.g. pve1.example.com)

ZFS Mail notifications

When using ZFS, it makes sense to also receive notifications for ZFS errors. The following settings can be made for this:

apt install zfs-zed &&
nano /etc/zfs/zed.d/zed.rc

#Adjust email address accordingly 
ZED_EMAIL_ADDR="root"

#Set temporarily for testing
ZED_NOTIFY_VERBOSE=1

systemctl reload-or-restart zed.service

The following scenario can be used for testing:

cd /tmp
dd if=/dev/zero of=sparse_file bs=1 count=0 seek=512M
zpool create test /tmp/sparse_file
zpool scrub test

After this, you will receive an email about the completion of the scrubbing of test. The test file can be deleted afterwards by deleting the temporary pool:

zpool export test
rm /tmp/sparse_file

Ceph mail notifications

If Ceph in combination with ProxmoxVE is in use, you will not receive mail notifications with regard to Ceph by default. Some errors are displayed in the Ceph dashboard of PVE, but no e-mail is sent.

Overview monitoring solutions

In the following, there is an overview of possible monitoring tools. For checkmk and Grafana including InfluxDB2, we provide our own instructions:

Overview of available solutions

Tool	Costs	Open-Source	Predefined Checks	Checks (Singlehost)	Checks (Cluster)	Checks (Ceph)	Checks (ZFS)	Wiki-article
Checkmk RAW Edition	free of charge	yes (Github)	yes (via User Interface)	x	x	x	x	Checkmk RAW edition - Docker Container Installation Monitoring of Proxmox clusters with checkmk Monitoring of Proxmox VE Ceph hosts with checkmk
Nagios/Icinga	free of charge	yes (Github)	yes(Third Party)	not tested	not tested	not tested	not tested	view https://github.com/kasper5/proxmox-monitor
Zabbix	free of charge	yes (Github)	yes(Tutorial, Third Party)	not tested	not tested	not tested	not tested	view https://zabbix.com/de/download_appliance view https://www.zabbix.com/de/integrations/proxmox#proxmox
PRTG	free of charge (1)	no	no (only via snmpd)	not tested	not tested	not tested	not tested	view https://github.com/in-famous-raccoon/proxmox-snmp
Grafana	free of charge	yes (Github)	yes (Third Party)	more suitable for Live-Monitoring of VMs and host resources.				InfluxDB2 + Grafana Docker Container Installation in Ubuntu InfluxDB2 + Grafana configuration of a Metric servers for Proxmox VE

₍₁₎ free of charge up to 100 checks / sensors

References

Author: Jonas Sterr Jonas Sterr has been working for Thomas-Krenn for several years. Originally employed as a trainee in technical support and then in hosting (formerly Filoo), Mr. Sterr now mainly deals with the topics of storage (SDS / Huawei / Netapp), virtualization (VMware, Proxmox, HyperV) and network (switches, firewalls) in product management at Thomas-Krenn.AG in Freyung.

Translator: Alina Ranzinger Alina has been working at Thomas-Krenn.AG since 2024. After her training as multilingual business assistant, she got her job as assistant of the Product Management and is responsible for the translation of texts and for the organisation of the department.