Developing a New Sink

If Robusta doesn't support the sink you need, consider implementing your own.

What Are Robusta Sinks?

Sinks are the destinations to which Robusta sends data. For example, when sending Robusta messages to Slack, Robusta uses a Slack sink.

Internally, Robusta generates Findings, or messages, which are then formatted by each sink in an appropriate manner. For example, a link might be formatted one way for Slack (e.g. markdown) and in another format for another destination (e.g. HTML).

Before reading this tutorial, make sure you are familiar with the Findings API It contains explanations of the types of findings your sink will have to process.

How Sinks are Implemented

Sinks are located in src/robusta/core/sinks. Each sink consists of a sink class and a config class. Optionally, helpers are used from src/robusta/integrations.

To implement a new sink you must:

  1. Build Robusta from source

  2. Add a new Python module inside src/robusta/core/sinks containing your sink’s source code

  3. Implement a sink config class

  4. Implement a sink class

Let's take a closer look at steps 3 and 4.

Implementing The Config Class

There are two configuration classes we need to provide so our new sink can work properly. Those are the “sink config” and “sink config wrapper” classes.

Let’s take a look at Robusta’s Mattermost sink as an example.

The relevant classes can be found at src/robusta/core/sinks/mattermost/mattermost_sink_params.py

The class MattermostSinkParams contains all the parameters our sink has. In this example, we have url, token, token_id, and channel parameters. Robusta uses Pydantic for validation This guarantees that all the required parameters will be present to set up our sink. (You can also provide additional validation if needed, just like the url parameter in the Mattermost sink).

class MattermostSinkParams(SinkBaseParams):
    url: str
    token: str
    token_id: str
    channel: str

    @validator("url")
    def set_http_schema(cls, url):
        parsed_url = urlparse(url)
        # if netloc is empty string, the url was provided without schema
        if not parsed_url.netloc:
            raise AttributeError(f"{url} does not contain the schema!")
        return url

The MattermostSinkConfigWrapper has nothing but the attribute to store our sink configuration. It defines exactly how the sink’s configuration should look in your Robusta YAML file. (E.g, if you renamed mattermost_sink in MattermostSinkConfigWrapper to mattermost_cool_sink, then Robusta’s YAML configuration would need to contain a mattermost_cool_sink key to recognize the sink).

class MattermostSinkConfigWrapper(SinkConfigBase):
    mattermost_sink: MattermostSinkParams

    def get_params(self) -> SinkBaseParams:
        return self.mattermost_sink

Accordingly, you should create two configuration classes for your new sink. These classes must inherit from SinkBaseParams and SinkConfigBase accordingly.

Implementing the Sink Class

Now we will implement the sink itself.

All sinks inherit from the SinkBase class so they can be integrated with Robusta. The main logic for the sink is located in the write_finding method. It accepts two parameters: finding, which is the Findings instance, and the platform_enabled boolean value. The platform_enabled value indicates whether the Robusta platform sink is enabled in the configuration, which allows us to add special buttons like “Silence” and “Investigate” to the message. These buttons send users to the Robusta UI, so only show them if the UI (aka platform) is enabled.

To start, create a Sink class, inheriting from SinkBase.

Inside your class, two methods need to be defined: the constructor method and the write_finding method that will do all the real work.

The easiest way to understand how sinks work is to find the Webhook sink class, as it has a pretty simple structure.

Webhook.write_finding takes as input a Finding instance containing several enrichments. Those enrichments should be transformed into the state that our sink can consume. The webhook sink simply transforms blocks to unformatted text that can be sent to any webhook. We cannot process some blocks this way (e.g. FileBlock or CallableBlock) so they are skipped in the __to_unformatted_text method. It’s OK to send only a subset of blocks in the sink, according to what the destination supports.

After the blocks are mapped and formatted into a message, they are sent to the actual destination. Most of Robusta’s sinks use a POST call to a relevant API provided by the destination. However, you are not limited to using only POST calls. You can connect to destinations however you choose. For example, you could even open a database connection if you wanted to.

Connecting the Sink to Robusta

Once you have completed your sink’s implementation, you must add it to Robusta so it is recognized. To do so, you need to add your Sink definition to several places:

  1. src/robusta/core/sinks/sink_factory.py

    Inside the create_sink method, add your newly created sink, as shown below:

    elif isinstance(sink_config, YourNewSinkConfigWrapper):
   return YourNewSink(sink_config, registry)
  2. src/robusta/core/model/runner_config.py

    Inside the sinks_config attribute definition, add your new sink, as shown below:

       DiscordSinkConfigWrapper,
   MattermostSinkConfigWrapper,
   YourNewSinkConfigWrapper
]

Congrats! If you’ve made it here, you can now configure your new sink in Robusta’s YAML configuration file and receive notifications at the destination of your choosing.