[monit] Alerts not being triggered

[Bruce Reed]

I’ve just begun using monit and I am having difficulties getting monit to send mail. I’m testing using ntpd and it is restarting the process, but not sending mail on service restart events or timeout. In monit.conf I have:

set alert address@hidden

I then had a check statement like this:

 check process ntpd with pidfile /var/run/ntpd.pid
    start program = "/etc/init.d/ntpd start"
    stop program  = "/etc/init.d/ntpd stop"
    if 3 restarts within 3 cycles then timeout
    alert address@hidden only on { timeout }

After 3 successive kills of ntpd and restarts by monit, a timeout message was logged, but no mail was sent. I tried removing the alert statement to see if mail would be sent on any event, but I only see information iogged and no mail is sent. Nothing in /var/log/maillog either.

Funny thing is, when I first set this up monit attempted to send mail, but an ACL on my postifx server prevented it from getting through. I fixed that and retried my test, but from that point on no mail was sent. Thought perhaps this was a state caching issue, but no change across monit restart and I installed monit on another server using the same conf files and I get the same results there.  

Thanks,
Bruce