To create an action, select the desired action and click on the icon to create it. When the conditions for the alarm to fire are met, all actions will be fired.

3.8.1 Send E-Mail Action
A commonly used alarm action is AutoNOC's ability to author and send custom e-mail messages when alarms turn on and off. The settings for the e-mail action are shown below:

Every User Account which is set up under Users on the Configuration page can have an e-mail address specified for it. Create a Set of users and then pick this set in the To User Set drop down box and AutoNOC will send a custom e-mail to each user in the set. The user set field can be left empty.

Additionally, an e-mail can be sent to e-mail addresses directly by specifying the e-mail address in the To field, such as "support@autonoc.com".

The Message Body field is actually an expression that is processed by AutoNOC's interpreter and can contain sophisticated information. The interpreter can even process and solve mathematical expressions! For complete information on the interpreter see 4.3 - Interpreter.

3.8.2 Send Pager Message Action
On some systems with modems installed, AutoNOC is able to use the industry standard TAP protocol to solve and send alphanumeric pager messages directly to pagers and cellphones. To make this work the user will need a pager gateway and pin number. As with e-mail, these settings can also be done on a user set basis as shown in the following action dialog box.

An alternative method that some customers have used on the Linux platform to generate alphanumeric pager messages is to configure the Application Launch Action described below and spawn the public domain QuickPage application. This application can be downloaded at http://www.qpage.org.

3.8.3 Play Sound Action
AutoNOC can also play sound files when alarms turn on and off. These are easily setup as an action by specifying a Wave Audio File as shown in the following dialog box:

3.8.4 Launch Application Action
A useful and powerful alarm action is the application launch action. The user needs to provide a custom executable, execution directory, and desired argument expression to set this up as shown in the following dialog.

When firing this action, AutoNOC will switch to the specified directory, solve the arguments as an AutoNOC expression within the scope of the object that triggered the alarm, and launch the executable (or script) with the arguments.

Many different actions are possible using the application launch capability.

3.8.5 Results Page
Every action has a results page. This page contains the script or console output from the last attempted launch of the action. This page is helpful for debugging problems such as e-mail server issues. The following screenshot shows an example of an e-mail action session:

Note that this screen is refreshed when the dialog box for the object is opened. To refresh the display, close the dialog and then click on the action object again to reopen it.

3.8.6 Manual Launch
Every action includes the ability to perform a test launch of the action. The test launch can be performed on the Menu tab of the action. When a manual launch is performed AutoNOC will fire the object off for testing purposes as if the alarm had just fired.

This is a helpful feature in debugging alarm action launch situations.