Get AlertManager working in 5 minutes and access 10+ notification channels including SMS, voice, etc.

SLS Alarm Management

As a member of the Prometheus ecosystem, AlertManager provides a variety of alarm management services including silencing, suppression, and notification. At the same time, AlertManager still has more or less shortcomings in actual use, such as too few notification channels and cumbersome rule configuration process.

In order to solve the problems of alarm notification and management, Alibaba Cloud Log Service launched the Log Service Alarm Center, providing customers with a one-stop alarm solution. The following figure shows the functional comparison between SLS alarm and AlertManager+Prometheus ecosystem. It can be seen that SLS alarm provides enterprise-level services, which can greatly facilitate users' work.

SLS open alarm

The open alarm function provided by SLS Alarm can easily connect the alarm messages of third-party systems to the SLS Alarm Center without any modification to the existing system. The alarm message flow after AlertManager is connected to SLS Alarm is shown in the figure below:

The following describes the detailed process of connecting AlertManager to SLS alarm, including SLS alarm configuration and AlertManager configuration.

SLS alarm configuration

1. Create an action strategy

The action strategy will determine how and through what channels SLS will notify you after receiving an alert message from Alert Manager. To do this, you need to first open the Alert Center, click Alert Management, and select an action strategy in the drop-down menu:

Then click the Add button in the upper left corner of the page, configure a new action strategy in the pop-up dialog box, and then click Confirm . Currently, the system supports notification channels such as voice, SMS, email, DingTalk, and WeChat for Enterprise. For specific configuration methods of action strategies, please refer to the official document Creating Action Strategies.

2. Create an open alert service

First, open the Alarm Center, click Alarm Management , and select Open Alarm in the drop-down menu:

Click the Create button in the upper left corner of the page, configure the new open alarm service in the pop-up dialog box, including the service ID and service name, and then click Save :

3. Create an open alarm application

Select the service created in the previous step and click the Apply button for the service in the Action column:

In the pop-up dialog box, click Create , add a new application, and click Save . Select AlertManager for the protocol, the strategy configured in the first step for the action strategy, and the default values ​​for the remaining options.

4. Obtain the open alarm application interface

Now, a new alarm application already exists in the open alarm service you created in step 2. Click the interface button in the operation bar of the application to obtain the interface information:

The interface address consists of two parts:

Domain name part: The access address of SLS, which is related to the region. Each region has its own access address.
Sub-path part: includes the Access Key Id used to send messages and the open alarm application Id. It should be noted that users need to replace {ACCESS_KEY_ID} in the sub-path part with the Access Key Id of a specific Alibaba Cloud RAM account and assign the permission policy AliyunLogOpenEventWrite to the account.

Alert Manager Access Configuration

In the Alert Manager configuration file, you first need to create a receiver for the alert message. To do this, you need to add a Webhook receiver under the receivers configuration item and fill in the interface address obtained in the previous step in the url field. Then, you need to add the previously created receiver under the route configuration item. A typical configuration file is shown below:

route:

receiver: '{RECIEVER_NAME}'

...

...

receivers:

- name: '{RECIEVER_NAME}'

webhook_configs:

- url:

 'http://{ALIYUN_SLS_ENDPOINT}/event/webhook/RAMAK_{ACCESS_KEY_ID}/{WEBHOOK_APP_ID}'

- name: ...

{RECIVER_NAME} is the name customized by the user for the recipient.

Effect display

View alarm messages

In the transaction view interface of the alarm center, you can view the list of received alarm messages and the details of the alarm message.

Alarm Access Overview

In the open alarm dashboard , you can view the filtering and sending status of alarm messages.

Alarm Notification Overview

The alert dashboard shows an overview of all alert messages, and you can view the volume of messages sent through different notification channels.