The Sending Profiles section allows you to configure templates that designate who will receive your notifications. Each Alerting Mechanisms has one or more groups of subscribers, the Sending Profiles area allows you to combine multiple subscriber groups into a single profile. This greatly simplifies the recipient selection when sending messages.
New Sending Profiles are added using the “Add New Sending Profile” button. You’ll be prompted to enter a Sending Profile name, and select the groups to include in the profile.Sending Profiles are a critical component of your AppArmor Alert system. It's important to understand how they work together with Alerting Mechanisms to allow your Alert Publishers to send notifications.
At their most basic level, Sending Profiles are:
- A group of Alerting Mechanism groups.
- An option for a Sender to select from when sending a Notification.
Creating a Sending Profile
When you click "Add New Sending Profile", you'll be presented with an interface that looks like this:
Profile Name
Give your Sending Profile a Specific Name. Since Sending Profiles are organized in alphabetical order, it's recommended that you use a naming scheme that will take advantage of this.
For example, you might decide to Prefix your Sending Profiles with their "Profile Type" (see below), and to give them a number in order to decide on their order:
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Checked By Default
You can optionally select one or more profiles to be a “Default”. This means that whenever you are sending a notification, the sending profile will be checked as a recipient by default in the sending wizard.You can delete a sending profile through the interface. Please note that deleting a Sending Profile has no effect on the underlying groups.
Profile Type
The Profile Type does 2 things:
- It defines whether the Sending Profile appears in the Actual or Test (or Exercise, if using) version of the Sending Wizard.
- It affects the value in the status tag in the CAP XML generated for the Notification, as per the Common Alerting Protocol standard.
This dropdown list has 3 options:
Actual
Actual Sending Profiles generally point to Alerting Mechanism Groups containing production data, for use during real events or "gap analyses" where you're testing the system's performance at scale.
Test
Test Sending Profiles generally point to Alerting Mechanism Groups that to not contain production data. They are generally used during system configuration and during Sender Training.
Exercise
Most clients never use this category, but if you create a Sending Profile with this category it will add an "Exercise" option to the Send Notification interface. In theory, this option could be used if you wanted to send your notifications to different Alerting Mechanism groups during an exercise, such as a Lockdown Drill. Most of our clients want to use the system in exactly the same way they would in an "Actual" situation, and so they opt never to use this option.
Advanced Options
If you click the "Show Advanced Options" button, you can fill out the CAP Parameter Name and CAP Parameter Value fields:
Filling out the fields as above will add the following inside each info tag in the CAP XML:
<parameter>
<valueName>AppArmor Parameter</valueName>
<value>myValue</value>
</parameter>
This option exists to facilitate integration with 3rd party systems that need a way to know which Sending Profile was selected when sending the notification.
Select Alerting Mechanism Groups
The available Alerting Mechanism Groups will be those that you've configured in your Dashboard. Take care when selecting the groups, as incorrect selections could cause you to associate production data with a Test Sending Profile, or vice versa.
We recommend checking your work thoroughly when creating a new Sending Profile, cross referencing your selections with the Alerting Mechanism groups you're selecting, and reaching out to AppArmor Support if you have any uncertainty.
Diagram
This simple diagram explains how Sending Profiles are structured.
