[Xymon] Trouble With Alert Format

[Adam Thorn]

On 04/05/2022 12:22, Jonathan Bishop wrote:
> Hello fellow xymoners,
> 
> I have recently setup monitoring of the existence of files in a 
> particular directory, and this seems to be working well. When I setup an 
> alert for a "red" condition, I receive an email message with what 
> appears to be some html tags within it, eg:
> 
>        &red <a 
> href="/xymon-cgi/svcstatus.sh?CLIENT=myserver.com&SECTION=file:/path/to/myfile">/path/to/myfile</a>
>        File is a  - should be file
> 
> I have tried setting the alert "FORMAT" to TEXT, PLAIN and SMS, but this 
> doesn't seem to have any effect. I have also tried sending the alert 
> through the html_mail.pl extension scripts, and this doesn't seem to 
> have any effect either. All I really want is a plain text message, which 
> is easy to read. Does anyone know how I could clean this up?
> 
> Example Alert Config:
> HOST=myserver.com
>          MAIL alerts at someone.who.cares.com REPEAT=240m COLOR=red FORMAT=TEXT

This may be a red herring, but I wonder if you could try changing the 
order of the different parts of the config line to e.g.

HOST=myserver.com COLOR=red MAIL alerts at someone.who.cares.com 
FORMAT=TEXT REPEAT=240m

Quoting selectively from the stock comments at the top of my alerts.cfg 
file ....

This file is made up from RULES and RECIPIENTS.
A RULE is a filter made from ... (etc etc)
A RECIPIENT can be a MAIL address, or a SCRIPT. Recipients can also have 
rules associated with them...

..so for your rule, HOST and COLOR constitute the "RULE", MAIL is the 
"RECIPIENT", and REPEAT and FORMAT then modify the "RECIPIENT". Your 
rule mixes together tokens from the RULE and RECIPIENT parts, which 
might lead to the config rule not being parsed properly.

(Or maybe this is nonsense and the order doesn't matter here; I suspect 
it would take a careful reading of the source to see how the different 
tokens in that config file get parsed)

Adam