Notifications Plugin

The Backstage Notifications System provides a way for plugins and external services to send notifications to Backstage users.

These notifications are displayed in the dedicated page of the Backstage frontend UI or by frontend plugins per specific scenarios.

Additionally, notifications can be sent to external channels (like email) via “processors” implemented within plugins.

Upstream documentation can be found in:

• Notifications and Signals
• Backend email plugin

Frontend

Notifications are messages sent to either individual users or groups. They are not intended for inter-process communication of any kind.

To list and manage, choose Notifications from the left-side menu item.

There are two basic types of notifications:

• Broadcast: Messages sent to all users of Backstage.
• Entity: Messages delivered to specific listed entities from the Catalog, such as Users or Groups.

Backend

The backend plugin provides the backend application for reading and writing notifications.

Authentication

The Notifications are primarily meant to be sent by backend plugins. In such flow, the authentication is shared among them.

To let external systems (like a Workflow) create new notifications by sending POST requests to the Notification REST API, authentication needs to be properly configured via setting the backend.auth.externalAccess property of the app-config .

Refer to the service-to-service auth documentation for more details, focusing on the Static Tokens section as the simplest setup option.

Creating a notification by external services

An example request for creating a broadcast notification can look like:

curl -X POST https://[BACKSTAGE_BACKEND]/api/notifications -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_BASE64_SHARED_KEY_TOKEN" -d '{"recipients":{"type":"broadcast"},"payload": {"title": "Title of broadcast message","link": "http://foo.com/bar","severity": "high","topic": "The topic"}}'

Configuration

Configuration of the dynamic plugins is in the dynamic-plugins-rhdh ConfigMap created by the Helm chart during installation.

Frontend configuration

Usually there is no need to change the defaults but little tweaks can be done on the props section:

            frontend:
              redhat.plugin-notifications:
                dynamicRoutes:
                  - importName: NotificationsPage
                    menuItem:
                      config:
                        props:
                          titleCounterEnabled: true
                          webNotificationsEnabled: false
                      importName: NotificationsSidebarItem
                    path: /notifications

Backend configuration

Except setting authentication for external callers, there is no special plugin configuration needed.

Forward to Email

It is possible to forward notification content to email address. In order to do that you must add the Email Processor Module to your Backstage backend.

Configuration

Configuration options can be found in plugin’s documentation.

Example configuration:

      pluginConfig:
        notifications:
          processors:
            email:
              filter:
                minSeverity: low
                maxSeverity: critical
                excludedTopics: []
              broadcastConfig:
                receiver: config # or none or users
                receiverEmails:
                  - foo@company.com
                  - bar@company.com
              cache:
                ttl:
                  days: 1
              concurrencyLimit: 10
              replyTo: email@company.com
              sender: email@company.com
              transportConfig:
                hostname: your.smtp.host.com
                password: a-password
                username: a-smtp-username
                port: 25
                secure: false
                transport: smtp

Ignoring unwanted notifications

The configuration of the module explains how to configure filters. Filters are used to ignore notifications that should not be forwarded to email. The supported filters include minimum/maximum severity and list of excluded topics.

User notifications

Each user notification has a list of recipients. The recipient is an entity in Backstage catalog. The notification will be sent to the email addresses of the recipients.

Broadcast notifications

In broadcast notifications we do not have recipients, the notifications are delivered to all users.

The module’s configuration supports a few options for broadcast notifications:

• Ignoring broadcast notifications to be forwarded
• Sending to predefined address list only
• Sending to all users whose catalog entity has an email