The Alerta monitoring system is a tool used to consolidate and de-duplicate alerts from multiple sources for quick ‘at-a-glance’ visualisation. With just one system you can monitor alerts from many other monitoring tools on a single screen.
Netadata alarms can be sent to Alerta so you can see in one place alerts coming from many Netdata hosts or also from a multi-host Netadata configuration. The big advantage over other notifications systems is that there is a main view of all active alarms with the most recent state, and it is also possible to view alarm history.
It is recommended to set up the server in a separated server, VM or container. If you have other Nginx or Apache server in your organization, it is recommended to proxy to this new server.
The easiest way to install Alerta is to use the Docker image available on Docker hub. Alternatively, follow the "getting started" tutorial to deploy Alerta to an Ubuntu server. More advanced configurations are out os scope of this tutorial but information about different deployment scenaries can be found in the docs.
Step 1. Create an API key (if authentication is enabled)
You will need an API key to send messages from any source, if
Alerta is configured to use authentication (recommended). To
create an API key go to "Configuration -> API Keys" and create
a new API key called "netdata" with write:alerts permission.
Step 2. configure Netdata to send alarms to Alerta
On your system run:
$ /etc/netdata/edit-config health_alarm_notify.conf
and modify the file as below:
# enable/disable sending alerta notifications
SEND_ALERTA="YES"
# here set your alerta server API url
# this is the API url you defined when installed Alerta server,
# it is the same for all users. Do not include last slash.
ALERTA_WEBHOOK_URL="http://yourserver/alerta/api"
# Login with an administrative user to you Alerta server and create an API KEY
# with write permissions.
ALERTA_API_KEY="INSERT_YOUR_API_KEY_HERE"
# you can define environments in /etc/alertad.conf option ALLOWED_ENVIRONMENTS
# standard environments are Production and Development
# if a role's recipients are not configured, a notification will be send to
# this Environment (empty = do not send a notification for unconfigured roles):
DEFAULT_RECIPIENT_ALERTA="Production"
We can test alarms using the standard approach:
$ /opt/netdata/netdata-plugins/plugins.d/alarm-notify.sh test
Note: Netdata will send 3 alarms, and because last alarm is "CLEAR"
you will not see them in main Alerta page, you need to select to see
"closed" alarma in top-right lookup. A little change in alarm-notify.sh
that let us test each state one by one will be useful.
For more information see https://docs.alerta.io