Configuring Alert

After you install Alert, you can log in using the administrator account (sysadmin) to configure Alert.
As part of the Alert installation, you might have used environment variables to configure settings such as encryption password and global salt, authentication, or providers. If you’ve done most of the configuration, the order in which you do the configuration in the user interface might change.

Alert has the following default users that have a default password of blackduck.

• sysadmin - full system configuration access.

• jobmanager - full access to distribution jobs and read permissions for other operational functions.

• alertuser - read access for distribution jobs only.

Only the sysadmin user has the appropriate permission to configure Alert system settings such as Settings, Authentication, User Management, or Scheduling.

The following outline is a rough guide to the order in which you might configure Alert, assuming you haven’t configured the environment variables when you installed Alert. How you actually proceed depends on your setup and what you’ve configured during installation.

Configuration workflow

Navigate to the following pages from the navigation panel in Alert to configure your Alert application.

1. Encryption configuration
   Configure the encryption password and global salt on the Settings page, which are required if you have not configured the encryption details using environment variables during installation.

   • Optionally, configure proxy settings if required.
     
     

2. User Management
   Configure users and roles on the User Management page.
   The default users in Alert might satisfy your requirements but you can configure new users and manage users and roles as required.

3. Authentication
   Configure LDAP and SAML users authentication on the Authentication page if you want to add users using these authentication methods.

4. Configure sending notifications in Alert
   To enable Alert to send notifications, you must configure the Black Duck Provider (provides the notifications), Channel (means for sending), and the Distribution job that defines all the elements required for sending notifications.
   
   

   • Providers
     On the Black Duck Providers page, configure the Black Duck provider that sends the Black Duck notification to Alert.

   • Channels
     On the Channels page, configure channels such as Email or Jira that you want to use in your distribution jobs to enable the sending of notifications from the Black Duck provider.

   • Distributions
     On the Distribution page, configure distribution jobs by configuring an Alert channel and Black Duck provider.
     Distribution jobs are used to process Black Duck provider notifications that are sent through channels such as Email or Slack.

5. Scheduling
   On the Scheduling page, configure scheduling of system tasks or leave at the default settings.
   
   

 

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Configuration method precedence

You can configure Alert mostly by using environment variables at startup, which leaves you with little configuration to do in the Alert GUI. Environment variables are inserted at startup if there is nothing in the Alert database for that configuration.

At startup, Alert processes the default setting of environment variables.

• The environment variable is written into the Alert database if the value for the corresponding configuration property isn't written in the database. Therefore, the environment variables take precedence over the default values shown in the user interface.

• If there is an existing configuration related to environment variables stored in the Alert database, the environment variables will have no effect.