Prometheus: Up & Running

Chapter 19. Alertmanager

In Chapter 18 you saw how to define alerting rules in Prometheus, which result in alerts being sent to the Alertmanager. It is the responsibility of your Alertmanager to take in all the alerts from all of your Prometheus servers and convert them to notifications such as emails, chat messages, and pages. Chapter 2 gave you a brief introduction to using the Alertmanager, but in this chapter you will learn how to configure and use the full power of it.

Notification Pipeline

The Alertmanager does more for you than blindly convert alerts into notifications on a one-to-one basis. In an ideal world you would receive exactly one notification for each production incident. While this is a stretch, the Alertmanager tries to get you there by providing you with a controllable pipeline for how your alerts are processed as they become notifications. Just as labels are at the core of Prometheus itself, labels are also key to the Alertmanager:

Inhibition

On occasion, even when using symptom-based alerting, you will want to prevent notifications for some alerts if another more severe alert is firing, such as preventing alerts for your service if a datacenter it is in is failing but is also receiving no traffic. This is the role of inhibition.

Silencing

If you already know about a problem or are taking a service down for maintenance, there’s no point in paging the oncall about it. Silences allow you to ignore certain alerts for a while, and are added via the Alertmanager’s ...