Revision: 735 http://svn.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/?view=rev&root=administration&revision=735 Author: iank Date: 2024-01-03 05:21:35 -0500 (Wed, 03 Jan 2024) Log Message: ----------- add info on programs for receiving prometheus alerts
Modified Paths: -------------- trunk/sviki/fsf/tools/prometheus.mdwn Modified: trunk/sviki/fsf/tools/prometheus.mdwn =================================================================== --- trunk/sviki/fsf/tools/prometheus.mdwn 2024-01-03 10:21:30 UTC (rev 734) +++ trunk/sviki/fsf/tools/prometheus.mdwn 2024-01-03 10:21:35 UTC (rev 735) @@ -265,6 +265,77 @@ ``` +## Background on notification methods + +Highly desirable alerting properties: + +* Ability to silence all notifications on a phone except for alerts. + +* Sent as directly as possible from prometheus server to phone & + computer so failures in other systems don't disable alerts. + +* Not intermixed with security sensitive communication stream. + +Evaluation of options: + + +Currently used options: + +xmpp server running on prometheus server: +https://github.com/trazfr/prometheus-xmpp-alerting there are 3 xmpp apps +in fdroid conversations, cheogram, and monocles chat, latter 2 are forks +of cheogram. Even though none of them can be used for general xmpp +communication and silence all notifications except for alerts, you can +dedicate one app to only receiving alerts. + +Nagstamon: this works fine but only for a computer. + + +Potentially good options but would need work to implement: + +Imap from the prometheus server: Needs investigation about notification +if you want to receive other mail. Possible we could build something +like k9mail but renamed to get a separate app with its own +notifications. + +Liberachat IRC Bot: Not totally direct. Useful for volunteer +transparency. Revolution IRC allows silencing notifications except for +custom rules. + +Bot send to self-hosted irc server on prometheus server: Would have to +learn how to run an irc server. + + +Not great options but they could work: + +gotify: The gotify android app can only connect to one gotify +server. This would mean we would have to send multiple data centers +alerts to one gotify server, making that a single point of +failure. There is a github issue for this years old, the creator said he +won't do it because it isn't useful to him personally. Before I knew +this, I got it running, it doesn't have a good message template by +default. Also, only has an android client. + +SMS alerts via email bridge: We started with this. These work ok, but +they rely on having non-voip sms. And the most minimal builtin template +for them is far too verbose. + +SMTP: Not sent directly. This requires sysadmins to have some outside +mail server and account setup that will only receive alerts. I have +this, but other sysadmins don't. I could provide it to them, but that +also makes it somewhat prone to temporary failures and downtime. + + + +Bad rejected options: + +xmpp server on prometheus host using +https://github.com/trazfr/prometheus-xmpp-alerting This has only like 75 +lines of code. Run the version in t11 with debug flag, its logs just say +connecting, but tcpdump shows nothing. I looked long and hard to figure +out what was going wrong, to no avail. + + ## Background on why we are avoiding Grafana for graphs