graphitepager 0.0.8

Graphite Pager is a small application to send PagerDuty alerts based on Graphite metrics. This makes it easy to be paged about what's happening in your system.

You shouldn't uses this yet, I'm still playing with it.

It can be deployed to Heroku (make sure you use SSL!)

## Background

Graphite is a great tool for recording metrics but it isn't easy to get paged when a metric passes a certain threshold.

Graphite-Pager is an easy to use alerting tool for Graphite that will send Pager Duty alerts if a metric reaches a warning or critical level.

## Requirements

• PagerDuty account
• Graphite

## Notifiers

Notifiers are what communicate with your preferred alerting service. Currently PagerDuty is required and HipChat is optional.

PagerDuty requires an application key set in the environment as PAGERDUTY_KEY

HipChat requires an application key HIPCHAT_KEY and the room to notify HIPCHAT_ROOM

More notifiers are easy to write, file an issue if there is something you would like!

## Installation

At the moment the easiest way to install Graphite-Pager is with Heroku! See the example at https://github.com/philipcristiano/graphite-pager-heroku-example.

1. Install the package with Pip

pip install -e git://github.com/philipcristiano/graphite-pager.git#egg=graphitepager

2. Set Environment variables ```

GRAPHITE_USER=HTTP-basic username GRAPHITE_PASS=HTTP-basic password GRAPHITE_URL=HTTPS(hopefully) URL to your Graphite installation PAGERDUTY_KEY=Specific PagerDuty application key

``` 3. Set up alerts in the alerts.yml file

4. Run graphite-pager

   graphite-pager --config alerts.yml

Where the file alerts.yml is in the following format.

# Configuration of Alerts

Configuration of alerts is handled by a YAML file. This can be verified with

graphite-pager verfify --config=config.yml

If it's invalid graphite-pager will likely crash.

## Documentation url

An attribute of docs_uls in the configuration will add a link to the documentation of the alert. Currently this is in the format of {docs_url}/{alert name}#{alert legend name}

## Alert Format

Alerts have 4 required arguments and 2 optional arguments.

Required arguments:

name - Name of thie alert group warning - Int for a warning value critical - Int for a critical value target - Graphtie metric to check, best if aliased

Graphite Pager understands the values for warning and critical in order to check < and >. If warning is less than critical, values above either will trigger an alert. If warning is greater than critical than lower values will trigger the alert.

Example:

Warning: 1 Critical: 2

0 is fine, 3 will be critical

Warning: 2 Critical: 1

0 is critical, 3 is fine.

Optional argument:

from - The Graphite from parameter for how long to query for ex. -10min default -1min

exclude - A list of targets to include. This must match the full target so it is recommended that you use the Graphite function alias() to make these readable.

### Ordering of Alerts

Alerts with the same name and target will only be checked once! This is useful if you want to have a subset of metrics with different check times and/or values

Example:

• name: Load target: aliasByNode(servers.worker-*.loadavg01,1) warning: 10 critical: 20

  System Message: WARNING/2 (<string>, line 119); backlink

  Inline emphasis start-string without end-string.

• name: Load target: aliasByNode(servers.*.loadavg01,1) warning: 5 critical: 10

Any worker-* nodes will alert for anything 10 or higher but the catchall will allow for the remaining metrics to be checked without alerting for worker nodes above 5

## TODO

• Create a package
• Improve URLs to the graph
• Make it easy to add new notifiers