Notifications

Notifications

Flotilla keeps what needs your attention as notices: records with a level, a start, an end, and what you did about them. That makes a long list something to work through rather than a wall on Overview, and it lets Flotilla tell "still wrong" from "wrong again".

Where notices appear

• The bell in the window bar, with a red count of what needs attention, gone at zero. It opens the Notifications screen.
• Overview, one at a time, with its fix, Dismiss, and arrows through the rest. See Overview.
• The menu bar: the badge turns red, and Needs Attention lists up to ten headings, each opening to its message and fix. See Menu bar and window.
• Each Mac's page under Hosts, first on its Overview tab — that Mac's notices only.
• Notification Centre, for the few kinds that are worth interrupting you for — below.

They are the same list everywhere, so a notice dismissed in one place is gone from the others.

How a notice lives

Every few seconds Flotilla works out what is wrong now, and the notices follow:

• a new condition starts a notice;
• one still present keeps its notice, updated — so "going on for 40 minutes" is true;
• one that has gone resolves its notice, with how long it lasted;
• one that comes back after resolving is a new notice, not the old one reopened.

Just after launch, while hosts are still being checked, their notices are left as they were rather than resolved — otherwise every relaunch would split each one in two.

Levels

Good, Information, Warning and Error. Warnings and errors need attention: they are what the bell counts and what Overview and the menu bar show, errors first, then the newest.

Dismiss, and why errors cannot be

Dismiss hides a notice until its situation changes. It leaves Overview, the bell and the menu bar, and stays in Notifications under Dismissed, where Restore brings it back. If its condition resolves and later returns, it comes back as a new notice — you dismissed that one, not every future one like it.

Errors cannot be dismissed, only dealt with. An error is something that stops Flotilla working — container down, no kernel, a host's update failing — and hiding it would leave a red badge with nothing behind it, or worse, no badge over a broken runtime.

Resolved and dismissed notices are kept for seven days, and at most 500. A notice that is still active and not dismissed is never dropped.

The Notifications screen

Needs Attention, Dismissed, Resolved and All, with a search field that matches the notice and the Mac it is about. Each row has its level, its heading and detail, which Mac, when it started, and its fix where there is one.

Select several with their checkboxes — or all, with the one at the top — to Dismiss them together, or Restore dismissed ones. If the selection holds errors, they are left out, and the button says how many it will dismiss.

A row opens the notice's own page: the full message, Level, Mac, Started, Last seen, Going on for or Resolved — lasted…, and its buttons — the fix, Show in the section that deals with it, and Dismiss or Restore.

Fixes

Where Flotilla can fix the cause, the notice carries the button: Start for a stopped container, on This Mac or a host that allows it; Download Kernel; Retry for a failed host update. The same button appears on Overview, on the Mac's page, in the menu bar and on the macOS notification, so the fix is wherever you meet the problem.

macOS notifications

Only an admin Mac sends notices to Notification Centre. A host is usually a Mac mini with no one at it: its troubles reach its admin instead.

These go out:

Kind	When	Default
Errors	container is down, there is no kernel, a host's update fails, or something you started fails	Always on
A Mac stopped answering	a host has not answered for two minutes	On
container stopped	on This Mac or a host	On
A network lost its connection	a container network loses its link to this Mac	On
A Mac is waiting for approval	a Mac asks to join with your enrolment key	On
A container is unhealthy	a container's health check fails	On
A Mac is answering again	a host you were told about comes back	Off
Container exited unexpectedly	a container on this Mac stops without being asked to	Off
A job you started failed	a task in Tasks fails, with Show Task in Flotilla	On
Image pull finished / Build finished	when Flotilla is not in front	Off

Each has a switch in Settings ▸ Notifications. Errors cannot be switched off. See Settings.

Some notices never go to Notification Centre: a version difference, an available update, a container in an unknown state, a host without container. They are worth seeing in Flotilla and not worth an interruption.

The rules that keep it quiet

• Nothing is shown while Flotilla is in front. The bell and Overview are already telling you.
• A host must be silent for two minutes before it is announced, so a blip never reaches the screen.
• At most three alerts a minute. When more are due than that, they go out together as one — "6 Macs stopped answering", with the first few names — because a switch failing takes forty hosts down at once, and forty alerts would bury the one that matters.
• Once per notice. A notice is announced when it becomes due, not again each time it is seen.

An alert carries the notice's fix and Dismiss, where dismissing is allowed, and clicking it opens the notice in Flotilla. When the notice resolves or is dismissed, the alert is taken out of Notification Centre, so what is left there is still true.

Permission and alert style

Flotilla asks for permission the first time it has something to send, not at launch: a prompt before you have done anything is the kind people deny by reflex, and a denied prompt is far harder to recover from than a late one. Turning notifications on later in System Settings works without a relaunch.

New installs ask for persistent alerts, which stay until clicked, because Flotilla only sends what needs you. macOS reads that once, when Flotilla first asks, and keeps an existing choice. Change it in System Settings ▸ Notifications ▸ Flotilla.

A locally run development build without an app bundle sends no notifications at all; macOS needs a bundle to deliver them.