Grafana VS alertmanager

Monitoring application logs is a crucial aspect of the software development and deployment lifecycle. In this post, we'll delve into the process of observing logs generated by Docker container applications operating within HashiCorp Nomad. With the aid of Grafana, Vector, and Loki, we'll explore effective strategies for log analysis and visualization, enhancing visibility and troubleshooting capabilities within your Nomad environment.

To help us visualize these scenarios, we'll build a Grafana Dashboard so we can follow along.

Visualization and Analysis: Choose a tool with intuitive and customizable dashboards, charts, and visualizations. A question to ask is, "Are the visualization features of this tool user-friendly and adaptable to our team's specific needs?" Tools like Grafana and Kibana provide powerful visualization capabilities.

Prometheus: Open-source monitoring system. Often used together with Grafana.

Grafana

Yes I'm aware that Grafana is open source but the method I used to find the API endpoints is far quicker than digging through hundreds of files in a codebase I'm not familiar with.

So, you will add one last container to allow us to visualize this data: Grafana, an open-source analytics and visualization platform that allows us to see traces and metrics simply. You can set Grafana to read data from both Tempo and Prometheus by setting them as datastores with the following grafana.datasource.yaml config file:

In example above, we use 2 additional parameters: code (HTTP response code) and page (page identifier), which provide detailed statistics. For example, you can build such graphs in Grafana:

Robin switched to the Grafana dashboard tab, and sure enough, the 5xx volume on web service was rising. It had not hit the critical alert thresholds yet, but customers had already started noticing.

- Alert Manager

You could use prometheus as a monitoring tool, blackbox_exporter to "export" the urls to prometheus, alertmanager for notifications, and grafana for nice gui dashboards (and maybe also notifications).

I found this other example below from this repo https://github.com/prometheus/alertmanager/issues/2559, but it is neither working.

vmalert: executes a list of the given alerting or recording rules against configured data sources. For sending alerting notifications vmalert relies on configured Alertmanager. Recording rules results are persisted via remote write protocol. vmalert is heavily inspired by Prometheus implementation and aims to be compatible with its syntax

Yes, I believe you can do all of what you're looking for without a UI. The alertmanager api has the ability to register receivers as well as to poll for alerts, silence them, etc: https://github.com/prometheus/alertmanager/blob/main/api/v2/openapi.yaml

I found it, unfortunately it doesn't help.

#cloud-config # environment: ${environment} runcmd: # install AWS CLI, neeeded for downloading of configuration files - | apt-get update && apt-get install unzip -y curl -Lo awscli.zip https://awscli.amazonaws.com/awscli-exe-linux-aarch64.zip unzip awscli.zip ./aws/install rm awscli.zip # install prometheus binary - | curl -Lo prometheus.tar.gz https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/download/v2.33.1/prometheus-2.33.1.linux-arm64.tar.gz tar -xvf prometheus.tar.gz cp ./prometheus-2.33.1.linux-arm64/prometheus /usr/local/bin/prometheus rm -rf ./prometheus-2.33.1.linux-arm64 rm -rf prometheus.tar.gz # install alertmanager binary - | curl -Lo alertmanager.tar.gz https://github.com/prometheus/alertmanager/releases/download/v0.23.0/alertmanager-0.23.0.linux-arm64.tar.gz tar -xvf alertmanager.tar.gz mv ./alertmanager-0.23.0.linux-arm64/alertmanager /usr/local/bin/alertmanager rm -rf alertmanager-0.23.0.linux-arm64 rm alertmanager.tar.gz # vait for EBS volume - | while [ ! -b $(readlink -f /dev/nvme1n1) ]; do echo "waiting for device /dev/nvme1n1" sleep 5 done # format volume blkid $(readlink -f /dev/nvme1n1) || mkfs -t ext4 $(readlink -f /dev/nvme1n1) # create a mount mkdir -p /data if ! grep "/dev/nvme1n1" /etc/fstab; then echo "/dev/nvme1n1 /data ext4 defaults,discard 0 0" >> /etc/fstab fi # mount volume mount /data # enable and start systemd services - | systemctl daemon-reload systemctl enable prepare-prometheus.service && systemctl start prepare-prometheus.service && sleep 10 systemctl enable prometheus.service && systemctl start prometheus.service systemctl enable alertmanager.service && systemctl start alertmanager.service write_files: - path: /usr/local/bin/prepare-prometheus permissions: '0744' content: | #!/bin/sh mkdir -p /etc/prometheus aws s3 cp s3://${s3_bucket}/prometheus.yaml /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yaml aws s3 cp s3://${s3_bucket}/alertmanager.yaml /etc/prometheus/alertmanager.yaml aws s3 cp s3://${s3_bucket}/prometheus.rules.yaml /etc/prometheus/prometheus.rules.yaml curl -X POST http://localhost:9090/-/reload || true - path: /etc/systemd/system/prepare-prometheus.service content: | [Unit] Description=Prepare prometheus / alertmanager configuration Wants=network-online.target After=network-online.target [Service] Type=oneshot ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/prepare-prometheus # please note data.mount in dependencies - path: /etc/systemd/system/prometheus.service content: | [Unit] Description=Prometheus Wants=network-online.target After=network-online.target data.mount prepare-prometheus.service [Service] Type=simple ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/prometheus \ --config.file /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yaml \ --storage.tsdb.path /data/ \ --web.enable-lifecycle \ --web.console.templates=/etc/prometheus/consoles \ --web.console.libraries=/etc/prometheus/console_libraries \ --enable-feature=remote-write-receiver [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target - path: /etc/systemd/system/alertmanager.service content: | [Unit] Description=Alert Manager Wants=network-online.target After=network-online.target data.mount prepare-prometheus.service [Service] Type=simple ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/alertmanager \ --config.file /etc/prometheus/alertmanager.yaml \ --storage.path=/data/ [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target

Prometheus recently added native support for time ranges in the alerting config https://github.com/prometheus/alertmanager/issues/876

Prometheus)Alertmanager: https://github.com/prometheus/alertmanager | https://prometheus.io/