Concepts¶

IMPulse is installed between Alertmanager and one of the messengers.

IMPulse gets alerts from Alertmanager and sends them to your messenger's channel based on application and route configuration (see Configuration File).

Alertmanager sends alerts with one of two statuses: firing and resolved. Of course, first status is always firing when problem occurs. Based on these statuses IMPulse creates Incidents.

Incident¶

Incident is a messege representation of alert with actual status.

Structure¶

Starting from v1.0.0 incident messages have such structure:

Default templates for status icons, header and body are here.

You can create your own template files based on defaults and set their path in application.template_files.

Statuses and their colors¶

Unlike of Alertmanager alerts, IMPulse Incidents may have 4 statuses: firing, resolved, unknown, closed.

firing and resolved¶

Incident changes status to firing and resolved based on Alertmanager's alerts statuses are sent to IMPulse.

unknown¶

IMPulse has additional status to determine incident status actuality.

Alertmanager has repeat_interval and group_interval values which force Alertmanager to send actual alert status even if it didn't change.

IMPulse has incident.timeouts.firing option during which the incident status should be updated by Alertamanger.

For this you should set Alertmanager's repeat_interval + group_interval a little bit more than incident.timeouts.firing.

If Incident status isn't updated during incident.timeouts.firing it switches to non-actual status named unknown.

The appearence of unknown Incident is caused by one of this reasons:

• IMPulse didn't receive actual status from Alertmanager. Maybe IMPulse was down, Alertmanager was down or there are some network problems
• repeat_interval+group_interval is less than IMPulse's incident.timeouts.firing

When Incident becomes unknown IMPulse sends warning message to application.admin_users.

closed¶

It is an Incident which hasn't already been tracked by IMPulse.

There are two ways how the Incident can be closed: - resolved Incident stays in this status for incident.timeouts.resolved time - unknown Incidents stays in this status for incident.timeouts.unknown time

Lifecycle¶

IMPulse creates an Incident with firing status and is tracking it till the Incident status will become closed.

Here you can see the whole lifecycle of an Incident:

Or individually for all statuses: