More details on the issue. The variables work fine for all notifications, except one:
For user login failure, i had chosen to "Do not log these reasons", but I still chose to receive email notifications of these login failure. Now, these email notifications only show [sitename], etc and not the actual underlying data.
The reason i put login failure in the "do not log these reasons", is that I wanted to be notified, and NOT block the user after x number of failures. Is there any other way to log this?