Set up alerts in Proxmox before it's too late!

Setting up alerts in Proxmox is important and critical to making sure you are notified if something goes wrong with your servers. It's so easy, I should have done this years ago! In this tutorial, we'll set up email notifications using SMTP with Gmail or G Suite that send email alerts when there are disk errors, ZSF Issues, or when backup jobs run. We'll then test the alerts to make sure they are working by yoinking a drive from my ZFS pool (and hopefully it doesn't fail).

A HUGE THANKS to Micro Center for sponsoring today's video.

(Affiliate links may be included in this description. I may receive a small commission at no cost to you.)

00:00 - Why you should set up alerts in Proxmox
01:42 - Micro Center / Free SSD (Sponsor)
02:56 - Where can I find the documentation
03:07 - Installing and configuring dependencies
03:54 - Google Email address configuration
08:43 - Configuring postfix and customizing the email alert
11:47 - Changing the mail sender name with pcre
14:20 - Configure where email alerts are sent
15:01 - Backup Alerts
17:33 - SMART alerts
18:53 - ZFS Alerts
19:52 - Testing in Production
24:03 - How Proxmox alerts could be better
25:30 - Stream Highlight - "Just some flashing lights & music"

#Proxmox #HomeLab

Thank you for watching!

[TechnoTim]

What's your favorite thing about Proxmox?

[bamzilla]

absolutely perfect timing! this is exactly what I'll be spending my last day in the office before the holidays doing. it always irked me that there wasn't more notification control in Prox. I have been relying on the ceph dashboard and cluster health to know when a disk goes down and it is far from ideal. And my Zabbix dashboard is not fully configured yet, so this is a perfect fix in the meantime.

[HeyRay]

What perfect timing for this guide! The "old_age" flag on several of the drives in my oldest ZFS array just got triggered a few weeks ago so it will be nice to have notification as soon as one, or more, of them throw a more urgent SMART flag.

Thanks for another great guide!

[arnoldoree]

Really handy video guide, and very timely for me. Glad you were balanced in reporting the notification system's shortcomings also.

[supershaggyberto]

Same story here. Didn't have alerts setup and randomly decided to check the status of my drives and saw that I was one drive away from losing all my data. Thanks for the great tutorial!

[kyrujames]

Thanks for this thorough overview on how to have visibility on my proxmox server, right after i did this i discovered 8.1 includes some native GUI for notifications. Might be worth a new video lol

[JohnFilion]

Thanks for the video, it was very helpful. I just got my proxmox servers set up using this approach, and it worked great!

[nalle]

Nice way to get rid of some extra layers of complexity. Some labor involved but for us homelabbers it’s cool - we are eager to spend hours to save money. A very nice video as usually.

[CrashLoopBackOff-Ks]

Leaving this comment for the algorithm and to reiterate my appreciation for all that you give to the community. This worked flawlessly for me. I have 4 proxmox nodes, so I ran most of the commands with adhoc ansible commands against the nodes. Super happy with having this working now. Before I was sporadically getting emails from proxmox, but gmail would often block them. This is a huge improvement. Thanks, again.

[gitarrtoken]

Most useful tutorial so far IMO! Thank you Tim! :)

[jaimecabrera]

What a great tutorial. My alerts are now configured, thanks.

[brianxevdo]

Logging in to set this up now! Once again thank you for the video!!

Hey Tim, recently found your channel and this is my first comment. Great fucking work! As a SysAdmin, this video is high quality! All the world's success to you in 2023.

[CoolWolf]

Thanks a lot Tim for sharing your knowledge - works like a charm! I was able to setup email notifications on 3 PVE nodes (one Cluster) and my two PBS Servers. Not sure if I am really looking forward to receiving emails now ;-)

[HarryWesterman]

It works fine Tim, thanks for the help!

[beyond]

Just a quick note, the zpool clear command is used to clear the error counts on drives back to zero, it does not clear data off the drive. zfs was asking you to do this so you could see if any new errors occurred on the drive you pulled and reinserted. so you can check if it actually needs to be replaced because errors are increasing or if all is OK and can be left alone. zpool status with high error counts can often be a sign of a drive in a prefail state that SMART has not yet picked upon, but zfs has due to all the checksums zfs uses. hope that helps and saves on future heart attacks 😊

[AndrewSpec]

Thanks for that tutorial. I configured it for Proxmox and also for PBS :D

[jesusmr]

Another great tutorial Tim, thank for sharing!!!

[HybridShadw]

1. I love all these recommendations/ alternatives in the comments section. That's one of favorite part about home-labbing!

2. You could also use n8n. You can send the data via curl as a response to a listening webhook on the n8n server. I'm not sure if you could pull the error message from the log (i watched the video but came back for the microcenter link lol). N8n could then send out the alert via any of their options like slack, discord, mattermost, etc.

[fronix]

I like this, I've had alerts going since the start but I've had to test them several times because I never get any so I always get worried it's stopped working :D