Alerta monitoring system and console

The alerta monitoring tool was developed with the following aims in mind:

• distributed and de-coupled so that it is SCALABLE
• minimal CONFIGURATION that easily accepts alerts from any source
• quick at-a-glance VISUALISATION with drill-down to detail

More screenshots are available here

Requirements

• [ActiveMQ][1] or [RabbitMQ][2] ie. a message broker that supports STOMP
• [MongoDB][3]

Installation

The backend components are written in Python and the web frontend in JavaScript so there is nothing to compile.

To install and configure the requirements on Debian/Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install mongodb-server
$ sudo apt-get install rabbitmq-server

To enable STOMP in RabbitMQ and configure the broker:

$ sudo /usr/lib/rabbitmq/bin/rabbitmq-plugins enable rabbitmq_stomp
$ sudo service rabbitmq-server restart
$ wget http://guest:guest@localhost:55672/cli/rabbitmqadmin && chmod +x rabbitmqadmin
$ ./rabbitmqadmin declare exchange name=alerts type=fanout

To run Alerta in a python virtual environment:

$ pip install virtualenv
$ pip install virtualenvwrapper
$ export WORKON_HOME=$HOME/.virtualenvs
$ mkdir -p $WORKON_HOME
$ source /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh
$ mkvirtualenv alerta

To install and configure a test implementation of alerta:

$ git clone git://github.com/guardian/alerta.git alerta
$ cd alerta
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ python setup.py install

To start alerta with a configuration that logs to /tmp:

$ alerta --log-dir=/tmp
$ alerta-api --log-dir=/tmp

To run in the foreground:

$ alerta --log-dir=/tmp --debug --foreground --use-stderr
$ alerta-api --log-dir=/tmp --debug --use-stderr

To use the alert console modify $HOME/.alerta.conf so that the API uses a free port and static content can be found:

[DEFAULT]
api_port = 8000

[alerta-api]
dashboard_dir = /path/to/alerta/dashboard/v2/assets/

For example, if the repo was cloned to /home/foobar/git/alerta then the dashboard_dir directory path will be /home/foobar/git/alerta/dashboard/v2/assets/.

And then the alert console can be found at:

http://localhost:8000/alerta/dashboard/v2/console.html
```

To see some test alerts in the console run:

```
$ contrib/examples/create-new-alert.sh
```

Optional (for alert history)
--------

- [elasticsearch][4]
- [Kibana][5]

> Note: None of these packages require special configuration to work with Alerta.

More Information
----------------

See the alerta [wiki][6]

Contribute
----------

If you'd like to hack on Alerta, start by forking this repo on GitHub.

http://github.com/guardian/alerta

License
-------

    Alerta monitoring system and console
    Copyright 2012 Guardian News & Media

    Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
    you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
    You may obtain a copy of the License at

        http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

    Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
    distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
    WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
    See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
    limitations under the License.

[1]: <http://activemq.apache.org/> "Apache ActiveMQ"
[2]: <http://www.rabbitmq.com> "RabbitMQ"
[3]: <http://www.10gen.com/> "10gen MongoDB"
[4]: <http://www.elasticsearch.org/> "elasticsearch"
[5]: <https://github.com/rashidkpc/Kibana> "Kibana"
[6]: <https://github.com/guardian/alerta/wiki> "Alerta wiki"