airbnb / alerts

An example alerts repo, for use with airbnb/interferon.

Geek Repo:Geek Repo

Github PK Tool:Github PK Tool

alerts example

This is an example alerts repository for interferon which adds a few alerts and groups as well as adding a couple of custom host sources.

Table of Contents

Customizations

There are a few customization points for interferon that can be implemented in the alerts repository without having to commit changes to interferon itself. With the exception of config.yml the other entries in this list are all directories.

config.yml

The config.yml file contains settings for interferon including which components to enable. It has the following configurable settings that can be set as YAML mapping keys:

  • verbose_logging: boolean value true or false which sets the logging verbosity for interferon.
  • alerts_repo_path: string value of the directory to look for the alerts directory and any additional directories for destinations, group_sources, host_sources modules.
  • destinations / group_sources / host_sources: list of maps containing the following keys.
    • type: string value of the module to load for the given type (e.g. "filesystem" will look for filesystem.rb in the directory named as the current parent key in the alerts_repo_path).
    • enabled: boolean value true or false whether or not to use a particular module.
    • options: map of additional options to pass to the module.

alerts

You can look at the example files in alerts/ to get a taste of the syntax. You will need the following fields in your alerts file:

  • name: this will be the primary key of your alert, and will show up in emails and in the UI. Only one alert of a given name will be created, so if your alert name is not using some part of the @hostinfo object to make it unique, you will end up with a single alert.
  • message: the body of the alert that will be set to the destinations (currently only Datadog).
  • applies: determines which hosts the alert applies to; putting true will end up creating as many alerts as the number of distinct names your alert expands into. Interferon will iterate through all the hosts generated by host_sources and test them agains the expression here.
  • notify.people: an array of the people who will be receiving the alert.
  • notify.groups: an array of groups who will be receiving the alert. The group mapping will be based on the output of group_sources. The filesystem group_source module will read the groups in the groups directory.
  • metric: The Datadog metric alert query.
  • silenced: The Datadog silenced setting.
  • timeout: The Datadog timeout setting in seconds (gets converted to timeout_h).

destinations

This directory contains additional modules for destinations.

groups

This is the default location where the the built-in filesystem group_source reads it's YAML files. If you don't want to store groups as YAML files or have your own group_source, you can remove this directory and remove the filesystem group_source from config.yml.

Otherwise, you may configure groups with YAML files containing the following keys:

  • name: Name of the group (used in alerts).
  • people: List of people in the group.
  • alias_for: Name of another group that this group is an alias for. Useful for transistion periods when renaming groups.

To post to a slack channel, make sure that the slack integration is configured to include that channel: https://app.datadoghq.com/account/settings#integrations/slack

group_sources

This directory contains additional modules for group_sources. Each group_source should be a class which implements the following methods.

  • intialize(options): Called for initializing the group_source and reading the options passed in from config.yml.
  • list_groups: Called to get the group mapping generated by this module. Should return a hash contain group name to people.

host_sources

This directory contains additional modules for host_sources.

We've implemented a few AWS-related host sources using billow. Using Billow instead of hitting the AWS API directly can help avoid hitting rate limits if deployments are frequent.

You can implement your own host_sources using your own APIs to expose the hosts available in your infrastructure. Each host_source should be a class which implements the following methods:

  • intialize(options): Called for initializing the group_source and reading the options passed in from config.yml.
  • list_hosts: Called to get the host list generated by this module. Should return a list of hashes that can be referenced using @hostinfo in alerts.

Tests

Tests can be run via run via rake spec (to test additional code/modules) and rake test (to test the alert files). There is a datadog syntax checker built into rake test that will check for valid Datadog syntax.

There are additional tests in script/pre-commit and test/check_syntax.sh that can be run to check the syntax of other files.

Deploying

When committing to the alerts repository, you should ensure that rake test is run to check the syntax of the datadog metrics.

To build the alerts repository run:

bundle install

Once built and deployed, interferon can be run via the following commands assuming the config.yml file is placed in the current working directory.

For dry-run:

bundle exec interferon --dry-run -c ./config.yml

For real run:

bundle exec interferon -c ./config.yml

Best practices

Although you can run interferon from your local workstation, we do not recommend this except for dry-run. Since a single interferon instance expects to be managing all interferon created alerts, running multiple instances can cause a lot of churn if the alerts or any of the sources are not completely in sync. You should use a build system which produces artifacts of this repository then have a deployment system set up the latest artifact and invoke interferon. We also recommend running interferon periodically (i.e. using cron) on the deployed host to keep the alerts in sync with infrastructure changes and to clean up manual changes made in the UI.

About

An example alerts repo, for use with airbnb/interferon.

License:MIT License


Languages

Language:Ruby 99.6%Language:Shell 0.4%