Route By Alert Name

By default, Robusta notifications are sent to all sinks.

In this guide, you'll learn to route alerts by their name:

  • KubePodCrashLooping alerts will be sent to a #crash-alerts channel

  • All other alerts will be sent to #general-alerts

Prerequisites

All least one existing sink must be configured. Below, we'll assume it's a Slack sink.

Setting Up Routing

Assume you have an existing Slack sink as follows:

sinksConfig:
- slack_sink:
    name: sink1
    slack_channel: general-alerts
    api_key: secret-key

The first step is to duplicate your sink. You need two unique sinks - one for each channel:

sinksConfig:
- slack_sink:
    name: sink2
    slack_channel: crash-alerts
    api_key: secret-key
- slack_sink:
    name: sink1
    slack_channel: general-alerts
    api_key: secret-key

The sinks are nearly identical - only the name and slack_channel parameters vary:

  • The name field identifies this sink in Robusta and can be chosen arbitrarily - so long as it is unique between sinks

  • The slack_channel field should match a channel in your Slack account

The next step is to update the configuration so that #crash-alerts receives a subset of alerts:

sinksConfig:
- slack_sink:
    name: sink2
    slack_channel: crash-alerts
    api_key: secret-key
    - scope:
        include:
        # only send notifications for the KubePodCrashLooping alert
        - identifier: [KubePodCrashLooping]
- slack_sink:
    name: sink1
    slack_channel: general-alerts
    api_key: secret-key

We added an inclusion scope for the #crash-alerts channel. To filter alerts by their name, use the identifier field which corresponds to the Prometheus alert name.

One final step: we must update the default sink to exclude KubePodCrashLooping. You can do this two ways:

Option 1: add an exclusion scope:

sinksConfig:
- slack_sink:
    name: sink2
    slack_channel: crash-alerts
    api_key: secret-key
    - scope:
        include:
        # only send notifications for the KubePodCrashLooping alert
        - identifier: [KubePodCrashLooping]
- slack_sink:
    name: sink1
    slack_channel: general-alerts
    api_key: secret-key
    - scope:
        exclude:
        # don't send notifications for the KubePodCrashLooping alert
        - identifier: [KubePodCrashLooping]

Option 2: use stop: true to prevent alerts from propogating after a match:

sinksConfig:
- slack_sink:
    name: sink2
    slack_channel: crash-alerts
    api_key: secret-key
    # add the following line!
    stop: true
    - scope:
        include:
        - identifier: [KubePodCrashLooping]
- slack_sink:
    name: sink1
    slack_channel: general-alerts
    api_key: secret-key

Whichever way you chose, now KubePodCrashLooping alerts are sent to #crash-alerts. Other alerts go to #general-alerts.