Introduction

Alerting pipelines are the heart of how Alertmanager processes, groups, and routes alerts received from Prometheus or other monitoring systems.

1. Receiving Alerts

Alertmanager accepts incoming alerts through its HTTP API. Alerts typically come from Prometheus when alert rules evaluate to “firing.”

2. Grouping

Alerts with similar labels can be grouped together to avoid alert storms. For example, multiple alerts for the same service failure can be bundled into a single notification.

3. Inhibition

This feature allows suppressing certain alerts when a related, higher-priority alert is active. This helps reduce noise by avoiding redundant alerts.

4. Silencing

Silencing temporarily mutes alerts based on matching labels, useful during maintenance windows or known outages.

5. Routing

Based on alert labels and rules defined in the configuration, alerts are routed to the appropriate receivers like email, Slack, or PagerDuty.

6. Notification Sending

Finally, Alertmanager sends notifications to the configured channels, ensuring your team gets timely alerts.

Summary

The alerting pipeline in Alertmanager ensures alerts are processed smartly, reducing noise and delivering actionable notifications to the right people.