Alertmon is a production alerting platform originally built to power on call at Foursquare. It is written in Python atop the Tornado framework to integrate with Graphite time series data, and utilizes MongoDB and Redis as its backing data stores.
At a high level Alertmon contains several components:
- a web server for configuring and managing alert definitions, and viewing status information
- a cron utility for taking status snapshots of configured alerts
- a cron utility for querying alert statuses and triggering pages via email
Alerts are defined as Graphite queries with additional threshold and notification
metadata and are stored in MongoDB. Alert statuses are computed via the check_alertmon
cron process and are stored in Redis.
The code here is obviously not wired up to any build system, and likely needs some light modification to reproduce a working state. Beyond that, most configurable knobs are exposed in the settings.py file.
Additionally, a number of opensource frontend frameworks are excluded here for licensing simplicity. The versions bundled internally are:
| Framework | Version |
|---|---|
| Bootstrap | v3.1.0 |
| Backbone.js | ? |
| jQuery | v2.1.0 |
| jquery-textcomplete | v0.3.3 |
| Underscore.js | 1.6.0 |
These are laid out as follows:
foursquare/alertmon/static/
├── alertmon.js
├── backbone-min.js
├── backbone-min.map
├── bootstrap
│ ├── css
│ │ ├── bootstrap-theme.css
│ │ ├── bootstrap-theme.css.map
│ │ ├── bootstrap-theme.min.css
│ │ ├── bootstrap.css
│ │ ├── bootstrap.css.map
│ │ └── bootstrap.min.css
│ ├── fonts
│ │ ├── glyphicons-halflings-regular.eot
│ │ ├── glyphicons-halflings-regular.svg
│ │ ├── glyphicons-halflings-regular.ttf
│ │ └── glyphicons-halflings-regular.woff
│ └── js
│ ├── bootstrap.js
│ └── bootstrap.min.js
├── jquery.js
├── jquery.textcomplete.min.js
├── jquery.textcomplete.min.js.map
├── underscore-min.js
└── underscore-min.map
Foursquare is in the process of migrating away from Graphite and Alertmon internally as we standardize on a Prometheus-based monitoring stack. By request and for posterity, the Alertmon source code is archived here under an Apache 2.0 license, and you are thus free to use, modify, and redistribute it as you please. The code is provided "as is" however, and Foursquare will not be supporting or improving it in any way moving forward. We welcome anyone in the opensource community who is interested in picking it up as a supported project to do so.