Notifications overview

3 minute read

CloudBees CD can be configured to send email notifications to recipients at various junctures along the deployment process. Recipients can be CloudBees CD users and groups, as well as interested third parties. These objects support email notifications:

  • Pipeline objects

    • Manual task completion and outcome

    • Approval gate rules

    • Manual retry-on-error events

  • Process (Applications and Microservices) objects

    • Process-level completion and outcome

    • Manual process steps

    • Manual retry-on-error events

In summary, here’s how to set up email notifications for your CloudBees CD enterprise:

  • One-time setup: create one or more [Email Configurations] to define the particulars about your email servers you plan to use to send notifications.

  • Decide the events for which you want to send Email notifications.

  • For each type of notification, configure the email notification for the particular event.

Email configurations

Create one or more email configurations: click the main menu button and select Platform Home page from the DevOps Essentials list, then navigate to Administration > Email Configurations.

Define email configurations based on the context of the notifier. Some examples include:

  • Define a Release Approvals configuration to notify recipients interested in release approval notifications.

  • Define a Deploy Notification configuration for general application process run notifications.

You must define at least one configuration in order to implement notifications. For detailed information, see Email configurations.

Email notifications

This section lists type of objects for which notifications can be configured.

Process objects

CloudBees CD sends email notifications to users and groups at the application-process or microservice-process and application-process-step or microservice-process-step (type: process) levels. The notifications are triggered based on how the job finishes (the onCompletion event) and on the job outcome (success or failure).

When configuring email notifications:

  • You specify users, groups, or email addresses as recipients of the notifications.

  • You can also target notifications at specific environments.

  • You can enable or disable notifications at the application-process-step or microservice-process-step levels.

  • You can enable or disable email notifications for manual steps.

The user and group settings are defined and managed at the platform level.

CloudBees CD provides default templates for success and failure outcomes. All the templates have a name, subject, body, and type content that are stored as properties in CloudBees CD. See Email notifier templates for details about editing HTML default notifications and to create new email templates.

CloudBees CD also sends notifications for assignees and approvers of manual process steps. See Manual Steps and Tasks for more information.

Jobs, workflow states, and procedures

Email notification templates are stored as property sheets under the /server/ec_deloy/ec_notifierTemplates property sheet. You can modify or delete a template or add new templates if you have modify privileges on the server property sheet.

  • On-start notifier: Sends an email when a job or job step starts.

  • On-completion notifier: Sends an email when a job or job step completes.

  • On-workflow-enter notifier: Sends an email when the state becomes the workflow’s active state.

  • On-workflow-start notifier: Sends an email after the state’s subjob or subworkflow starts. If no subjob or subworkflow is defined for that state, the notifiers are not sent.

  • On workflow completion notifier: Sends an email after the state’s subjob or subworkflow completes. If no subjob or subworkflow is defined for that state, the notifiers are not sent.

You must create an email configuration before you create and configure email notifiers at the platform level. Then you can send them to individuals and groups.

To create or edit email notifiers, see Email Notifier—manage notifier templates . See the topics starting with "Email Notifier Template" for examples of HTML templates that you can use as-is or copy and rename to create a new template.

Pipelines

Notifications for pipelines are automatically sent in the following scenarios. You do not have to perform any additional steps to send email notifications.

  • For a manual task in a stage, the appropriate notifications are sent to the user or group who performs that task and to the user or group who responds when the task is completed.

  • When entry and exit gates have specified approvers, CloudBees CD sends approval notifications to them.

    • You can set the approvals such that approval from only one of the approvers is sufficient for the pipeline to progress. In this case, you can have one approval rule and have all the approvers assigned to that rule.

    • Instead, if you want all the key individuals to approve sequentially, you can specify multiple approval rules, each for a specific user.

    • In addition to specific users, approval rules support groups. Approval or rejection from any user in the group will allow the pipeline to progress or stop.

  • You can enable or disable email notifications for pipeline gate tasks and manual task approvals.

After approvers log into CloudBees CD, they can approve or reject the approval rules. The pipeline’s progress continues if the approval rules are approved or end with the appropriate error if the rules are rejected.

See Pipeline concepts for more information about notifications in pipelines.