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Aggregate alerts from various monitoring systems

Sound the Alarm

Article from ADMIN 89/2025

By Markus Stubbig

The free Alerta fields alerts from several monitoring systems and delivers them in a web GUI or at the command line.

Historically grown environments often use more than one monitoring system. For example, production might use Zabbix, while research uses Ganglia with its computing clusters, and IT swears by Observium. In other cases, monitoring runs locally on each of the organization's sites and, of course, the tools are from different vendors because the various sites purchased them independently.

The Alerta [1] alerting manager collects messages from all of these systems, summarizes and de-duplicates them, and displays the results on a clear-cut web page. The Alerta web view gives you the messages from all the monitoring applications involved, sorting the messages by criticality. If you don't want to commit right away, the demo page [2] will give you a taste of the features.

Installing Alerta

Alerta is based on the Python programming language with Flask as its web framework. The data can be stored in either MongoDB or PostgreSQL. For actions on the command line, a command of the same name can generate alerts. You can save yourself some work with the docker-alerta Docker image [3] from the GitHub repository.

To begin, open the docker-compose.yml file and change the value for ADMIN_PASSWORD; then, start the containers:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alerta/docker-alerta/refs/heads/master/docker-compose.yml
sed -i -e 's/ADMIN_PASSWORD=.*/ADMIN_PASSWORD=abc123/' docker-compose.yml
docker-compose up -d
alias alerta="docker exec -it root_web_1 /venv/bin/alerta"
alerta version

The final command outputs the version number and automatically checks whether the containers are running and whether internal communication in Alerta is working.

Now access the

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