EduHub Activity Notification Service

An Azure Function App that registers changes in the Education section of portal.azure.com and sends out emails to admins and users.

Created and designed by Tomas Lazauskas.

Summary

EduNotice sends the following communications to users:

• Confirmation: an email denoting the registration of the subscription.

• Updates: notification emails denoting changes in the subscription details.

• Time-based: notification emails denoting the amount of time remaining in the subscription duration according to the following schedule.

• Notification 1: 30 days before end
• Notification 2: 7 days before end
• Notification 3: 1 day before end

• Usage-based: notification emails denoting the monetary amount remaining in the subscription according to the following schedule.

• Notification 1: 50% of monetary credit has been used
• Notification 2: 75% of monetary credit has been used
• Notification 3: 90% of monetary credit has been used
• Notification 4: 95% of monetary credit has been used

EduNotice sends the following communications to admins:

• Summary: notification emails denoting changes EduHub activity since the last update.

Email examples

Confirmation	Summary

Prerequisites/Configuration/Set up

Set the required and optional environmental parameters (recommended by modifying the ~/.bash_profile file).

EduCrawler

export EC_EMAIL="example@mail.com" # EduHub account email address
export EC_PASSWORD="password" # EduHub account password
export EC_MFA=false # it only works if the EduHub account has MFA switched off

SendGrid (Azure service)

• Installation (optional, an existing service might be reused)

  • On portal.azure.com navigate to All services
  • Find SendGrid Accounts
  • Create a new SendGrid account

    Recommended settings:
    Location: UK South
    Pricing Tier: Free
    

• Set up

  • go to https://app.sendgrid.com/guide
  • confirm the email address that was used when creating the new account
  • Create a Single Sender
  • Verify using the Single Sender Verification
  • Generate an API KEY
    • go to API Keys
    • Create API Key
      • Restricted Access
      • Allow ONLY Mail Send Full Access
  • export the API key value as ENS_EMAIL_API environmental parameter as shown in the Setup section.

• Configuration

export ENS_EMAIL_API="<<replace me>>" # SendGrid API Key
export ENS_FROM_EMAIL="<<replace me>>" # Sender email address
export ENS_SUMMARY_RECIPIENTS="<<replace me>>" # a list of email address to whom summary emails will be send to

Container Registry (Azure service)

• Installation (optional, an existing service might be reused)
  • On portal.azure.com navigate to All services
  • Find Container registries
  • Add

  Recommended settings:
  Location: UK South
  SKU: Basic
  

  • go to resource
  • Settings -> Access keys
    • Enable Admin user
    • export Username as ENS_DOCKER_USER
    • export password as ENS_DOCKER_PASS
• Configuration

export ENS_DOCKER_IMAGE="<<replace me>>" # ex. registryname.azurerc.io/edunoticefuncapp:latest
export ENS_DOCKER_USER="<<replace me>>"
export ENS_DOCKER_PASS="<<replace me>>"

EduHub Activity Notification Service as a FunctionApp

• Configuration

# Azure Subscription
export ENS_SUBSCRIPTION_ID="<<replace me>>"

# Configure PostgreSQL DB
export ENS_SQL_SERVER="<<replace me>>"
export ENS_SQL_USERNAME="<<replace me>>"
export ENS_SQL_PASS="<<replace me>>"
export ENS_SQL_DBNAME="<<replace me>>"
export ENS_SQL_PORT="<<replace me>>"

export ENS_SQL_WHITELISTED_IP="<<replace me>>"

export ENS_SQL_HOST=$ENS_SQL_SERVER".postgres.database.azure.com"
export ENS_SQL_USER=$ENS_SQL_USERNAME"@"$ENS_SQL_SERVER

• FunctionApp container

The following make commands build and publish the custom FunctionApp container to the container registry.

cd EduNotice
make build
make push

Azure services

The infrastructure.sh bash script has two modes: TEST and PROD. Each of them in turn will:

• check if an appropriate resource group exists
• storage account is created
• PostgreSQL DB established
• republish EduHub Activity Notification Service FunctionApp
• update FunctionApp's local.settings.json local configuration file

cd EduNotice/utils/infrastructure
./infrastructure.sh

Getting help

If you found a bug or need support, please submit an issue here.

How to contribute

We welcome contributions! If you are willing to propose new features or have bug fixes to contribute, please submit a pull request here.