Sending Profiles are generally the final step completed in the configuration of your AppArmor Alert system. They are the method by which you can organize the groups of subscribers you created when setting up your Alerting Mechanisms (often many groups) into a manageable user experience for the people who will be sending 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:

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.

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:

<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.