Sending alerts

**Disclaimer: Prometheus automatically takes care of sending alerts generated by its configured alerting rules. It is highly recommended to configure alerting rules in Prometheus based on time series data rather than implementing a direct client.**

The Alertmanager has two APIs, v1 and v2, both listening for alerts. The scheme for v1 is described in the code snipped below. The scheme for v2 is specified as an OpenAPI specification that can be found in the Alertmanager repository. Clients are expected to continuously re-send alerts as long as they are still active (usually on the order of 30 seconds to 3 minutes). Clients can push a list of alerts to Alertmanager via a POST request.

The labels of each alert are used to identify identical instances of an alert and to perform deduplication. The annotations are always set to those received most recently and are not identifying an alert.

Both startsAt and endsAt timestamp are optional. If startsAt is omitted, the current time is assigned by the Alertmanager. endsAt is only set if the end time of an alert is known. Otherwise it will be set to a configurable timeout period from the time since the alert was last received.

The generatorURL field is a unique back-link which identifies the causing entity of this alert in the client.

  1. [
  2.   {
  3.     "labels": {
  4.       "alertname": "<requiredAlertName>",
  5.       "<labelname>": "<labelvalue>",
  6.       ...
  7.     },
  8.     "annotations": {
  9.       "<labelname>": "<labelvalue>",
  10.     },
  11.     "startsAt": "<rfc3339>",
  12.     "endsAt": "<rfc3339>",
  13.     "generatorURL": "<generator_url>"
  14.   },
  15.   ...
  16. ]