unsee

Alert dashboard for Prometheus Alertmanager.

Alertmanager UI is useful for browsing alerts and managing silences, but it's lacking as a dashboard tool - unsee aims to fill this gap. It's developed as a dedicated tool as it's intended to provide only read access to alert data, therefore safe to be accessed by wider audience.

To get notifications about new unsee releases you can subscribe to the RSS feed that GitHub provides - https://github.com/cloudflare/unsee/releases.atom To get email notifications please use one of the free services providing RSS to email notifications, like Blogtrottr.

Supported Alertmanager versions

Alertmanager's API isn't stable yet and can change between releases. unsee currently supports Alertmanager 0.4, 0.5 and 0.6.

Security

The unsee process doesn't send any API request to the Alertmanager that could modify alerts or silence state, but it does provide a web interface that allows a user to send such requests directly to the Alertmanager API. If you wish to deploy unsee as a read-only tool please ensure that:

• the unsee process is able to connect to the Alertmanager API
• read-only users are able to connect to the unsee web interface
• read-only users are NOT able to connect to the Alertmanager API

Metrics

unsee process metrics are accessible under /metrics path by default. If you set the WEB_PREFIX option a path relative to it will be used.

Building and running

Installing using the go command

unsee is go installable, so the easiest way is to run:

go install github.com/cloudflare/unsee

The unsee binary will be installed into $GOPATH/bin directory. Note that this will build the latest master version which might not work with your Alertmanager version. See supported Alertmanager versions.

Building from source

To clone git repo and build the binary yourself run:

git clone https://github.com/cloudflare/unsee $GOPATH/src/github.com/cloudflare/unsee
cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/cloudflare/unsee

To finally compile unsee the binary run:

make

Running

unsee is configured via environment variables or command line flags. Environment variable ALERTMANAGER_URI or cli flag -alertmanager.uri is the only option required to run. See Environment variables section below for the full list of supported environment variables. Examples:

ALERTMANAGER_URI=https://alertmanager.example.com unsee
unsee -alertmanager.uri https://alertmanager.example.com

There is a make target which will compile and run unsee:

make run

By default it will listen on port 8080 and Alertmanager mock data will be used, to override Alertmanager URI set ALERTMANAGER_URI and/or PORT make variables. Example:

make PORT=5000 ALERTMANAGER_URI=https://alertmanager.example.com run

Docker

Running pre-build docker image

Official docker images are built and hosted on hub.docker.com.

Images are built automatically for:

• release tags in git - cloudflare/unsee:vX.Y.Z
• master branch commits - cloudflare/unsee:latest

Examples

To start a release image run:

docker run -e ALERTMANAGER_URI=https://alertmanager.example.com cloudflare/unsee:vX.Y.Z

Latest release details can be found on GitHub.

To start docker image build from lastet master branch run:

docker run -e ALERTMANAGER_URI=https://alertmanager.example.com cloudflare/unsee:latest

Note that latest master branch might have bugs or breaking changes. Using release images is strongly recommended for any production use.

Building a Docker image

make docker-image

This will build a Docker image from sources.

Running the Docker image

make run-docker

Will run locally built Docker image. Same defaults and override variables apply as with make run. Example:

make PORT=5000 ALERTMANAGER_URI=https://alertmanager.example.com run-docker

Environment variables

ALERTMANAGER_TIMEOUT

Timeout for requests send to Alertmanager, accepts values in time.Duration format. Examples:

  ALERTMANAGER_TIMEOUT=10s
  ALERTMANAGER_TIMEOUT=2m

This option can also be set using -alertmanager.timeout flag. Example:

  $ unsee -alertmanager.timeout 2m

Default is 40s.

ALERTMANAGER_TTL

Interval for refreshing alerts and silences, tells unsee how often pull new data from Alertmanager, accepts values in time.Duration format. Examples:

ALERTMANAGER_TTL=30s
ALERTMANAGER_TTL=5m

This option can also be set using -alertmanager.ttl flag. Example:

$ unsee -alertmanager.ttl 5m

Default is 1m.

Note that the maximum value for this option is 15m. The UI has a watchdog that tracks the timestamp of the last pull. If the UI does not receive updates for more than 15 minutes it will print an error and reload the page.

ALERTMANAGER_URI

URI of the Alertmanager instance, unsee will use it to pull alert groups and silences. Endpoints in use:

• ${ALERTMANAGER_URI}/api/v1/alerts/groups
• ${ALERTMANAGER_URI}/api/v1/silences

Supported URI schemes:

• http://
• https://
• file://

file:// scheme is only useful for testing purposes, it's used for make run target.

Example:

ALERTMANAGER_URI=https://alertmanager.example.com

This option can also be set using -alertmanager.uri flag. Example:

$ unsee -alertmanager.uri https://alertmanager.example.com

This variable is required and there is no default value.

DEBUG

Will enable gin debug mode. This will configure to print out more debugging information on startup. Examples:

DEBUG=true
DEBUG=false

This option can also be set using -debug flag. Example:

$ unsee -debug

Default is false.

COLOR_LABELS_STATIC

List of label names that will all have the same color applied (different than the default label color). This allows to quickly spot a specific label that can have high range of values, but it's important when reading the dashboard. For example coloring the instance label allows to quickly learn which instance is affected by given alert. Accepts space separated list of label names. Examples:

COLOR_LABELS_STATIC=instance
COLOR_LABELS_STATIC="instance cluster"

This option can also be set using -color.labels.static flag. Example:

$ unsee -color.labels.static "instance cluster"

This variable is optional and default is not set (no label will have static color).

COLOR_LABELS_UNIQUE

List of label names that should have unique colors generated in the UI. Colors can help visually identify alerts with shared labels, for example coloring hostname label will allow to quickly spot all alerts for the same host. Accepts space separated list of label names. Examples:

COLOR_LABELS_UNIQUE=hostname
COLOR_LABELS_UNIQUE="cluster environment rack"

This option can also be set using -color.labels.unique flag. Example:

$ unsee -color.labels.unique "cluster environment rack"

This variable is optional and default is not set (no label will have unique color).

FILTER_DEFAULT

Default alert filter to apply when user loads unsee UI without any filter specified. Accepts comma separated list of filter expressions (visit /help page in unsee for details on filters). Examples:

FILTER_DEFAULT=level=critical
FILTER_DEFAULT="cluster=prod,instance=~prod"

This option can also be set using -filter.default flag. Example:

$ unsee -filter.default "cluster=prod,instance=~prod"

Default is not set (no filter will be applied).

JIRA_REGEX

This allows to define regex rules that will be applied to silence comments. Regex rules will be used to discover JIRA issue IDs in the comment text and inject links to those issues, instead of rendering as plain text. Rule syntax:

$(regex)@$(jira url)

Accepts space separated list of rules. Examples:

JIRA_REGEX="DEVOPS-[0-9]+@https://jira.example.com"

The above will match DEVOPS-123 text in the silence comment string and convert it to https://jira.example.com/browse/DEVOPS-123 link.

This option can also be set using -jira.regex flag. Example:

$ unsee -jira.regex "DEVOPS-[0-9]+@https://jira.example.com"

This variable is optional and default is not set (no rule will be applied).

PORT

HTTP port to listen on. Example:

PORT=8000

This option can also be set using -port flag. Example:

$ unsee -port 8000

Default is 8080.

SENTRY_DSN

DSN for Sentry integration in Go. See Sentry documentation for details. Example:

SENTRY_DSN=https://<key>:<secret>@sentry.io/<project>

This option can also be set using -sentry.dsn flag. Example:

$ unsee -sentry.dsn "https://<key>:<secret>@sentry.io/<project>"

This variable is optional and default is not set (Sentry support is disabled for Go errors).

SENTRY_PUBLIC_DSN

DSN for Sentry integration in javascript. See Sentry documentation for details. Example:

SENTRY_PUBLIC_DSN=https://<key>@sentry.io/<project>

This option can also be set using -sentry.public.dsn flag. Example:

$ unsee -sentry.public.dsn "https://<key>@sentry.io/<project>"

This variable is optional and default is not set (Sentry support is disabled for javascript errors).

STRIP_LABELS

List of label names that should not be shown on the UI. This allows to hide some labels that are not needed on the alert dashboard. Accepts space separated list of label names. Examples:

STRIP_LABELS=exporter_type
STRIP_LABELS="prometheus_instance alert_type"

This option can also be set using -strip.labels flag. Example:

$ unsee -strip.labels "prometheus_instance alert_type"

This variable is optional and default is not set (all labels will be shown).

WEB_PREFIX

URL root for unsee, you can use to if you wish to serve it from location other than /. Examples:

WEB_PREFIX=/unsee/

This will configure unsee to serve requests from http://localhost/unsee/ instead http://localhost/.

This option can also be set using -web.prefix flag. Example:

$ unsee -web.prefix /unsee/

Default is /.

Contributing

Please see CONTRIBUTING for details.

License

Apache License 2.0, please see LICENSE.