Netdata Agent alarms

Plugin: python.d.plugin Module: alarms

Overview

This collector creates an 'Alarms' menu with one line plot of alarms.status.

Alarm status is read from the Netdata agent rest api /api/v1/alarms?all.

This collector is supported on all platforms.

This collector supports collecting metrics from multiple instances of this integration, including remote instances.

Default Behavior

Auto-Detection

It discovers instances of Netdata running on localhost, and gathers metrics from http://127.0.0.1:19999/api/v1/alarms?all. CLEAR status is mapped to 0, WARNING to 1 and CRITICAL to 2. Also, by default all alarms produced will be monitored.

Limits

The default configuration for this integration does not impose any limits on data collection.

Performance Impact

The default configuration for this integration is not expected to impose a significant performance impact on the system.

Metrics

Metrics grouped by scope.

The scope defines the instance that the metric belongs to. An instance is uniquely identified by a set of labels.

Per Netdata Agent alarms instance

These metrics refer to the entire monitored application.

This scope has no labels.

Metrics:

Metric	Dimensions	Unit
alarms.status	a dimension per alarm representing the latest status of the alarm.	status
alarms.values	a dimension per alarm representing the latest collected value of the alarm.	value

Alerts

There are no alerts configured by default for this integration.

Setup

Prerequisites

No action required.

Configuration

File

The configuration file name for this integration is python.d/alarms.conf.

You can edit the configuration file using the edit-config script from the Netdata config directory.

cd /etc/netdata 2>/dev/null || cd /opt/netdata/etc/netdata
sudo ./edit-config python.d/alarms.conf

Options

There are 2 sections:

• Global variables
• One or more JOBS that can define multiple different instances to monitor.

The following options can be defined globally: priority, penalty, autodetection_retry, update_every, but can also be defined per JOB to override the global values.

Additionally, the following collapsed table contains all the options that can be configured inside a JOB definition.

Every configuration JOB starts with a job_name value which will appear in the dashboard, unless a name parameter is specified.

Config options

Name	Description	Default	Required
url	Netdata agent alarms endpoint to collect from. Can be local or remote so long as reachable by agent.	http://127.0.0.1:19999/api/v1/alarms?all	yes
status_map	Mapping of alarm status to integer number that will be the metric value collected.	{"CLEAR": 0, "WARNING": 1, "CRITICAL": 2}	yes
collect_alarm_values	set to true to include a chart with calculated alarm values over time.	no	yes
alarm_status_chart_type	define the type of chart for plotting status over time e.g. 'line' or 'stacked'.	line	yes
alarm_contains_words	A "," separated list of words you want to filter alarm names for. For example 'cpu,load' would filter for only alarms with "cpu" or "load" in alarm name. Default includes all.		yes
alarm_excludes_words	A "," separated list of words you want to exclude based on alarm name. For example 'cpu,load' would exclude all alarms with "cpu" or "load" in alarm name. Default excludes None.		yes
update_every	Sets the default data collection frequency.	10	no
priority	Controls the order of charts at the netdata dashboard.	60000	no
autodetection_retry	Sets the job re-check interval in seconds.	0	no
penalty	Indicates whether to apply penalty to update_every in case of failures.	yes	no
name	Job name. This value will overwrite the job_name value. JOBS with the same name are mutually exclusive. Only one of them will be allowed running at any time. This allows autodetection to try several alternatives and pick the one that works.		no

Examples

Basic

A basic example configuration.

jobs:
  url: 'http://127.0.0.1:19999/api/v1/alarms?all'

Advanced

An advanced example configuration with multiple jobs collecting different subsets of alarms for plotting on different charts. "ML" job will collect status and values for all alarms with "ml_" in the name. Default job will collect status for all other alarms.

Config

ML:
  update_every: 5
  url: 'http://127.0.0.1:19999/api/v1/alarms?all'
  status_map:
    CLEAR: 0
    WARNING: 1
    CRITICAL: 2
  collect_alarm_values: true
  alarm_status_chart_type: 'stacked'
  alarm_contains_words: 'ml_'

Default:
  update_every: 5
  url: 'http://127.0.0.1:19999/api/v1/alarms?all'
  status_map:
    CLEAR: 0
    WARNING: 1
    CRITICAL: 2
  collect_alarm_values: false
  alarm_status_chart_type: 'stacked'
  alarm_excludes_words: 'ml_'

Troubleshooting

Debug Mode

To troubleshoot issues with the alarms collector, run the python.d.plugin with the debug option enabled. The output should give you clues as to why the collector isn't working.

• Navigate to the plugins.d directory, usually at /usr/libexec/netdata/plugins.d/. If that's not the case on your system, open netdata.conf and look for the plugins setting under [directories].

  cd /usr/libexec/netdata/plugins.d/

• Switch to the netdata user.

  sudo -u netdata -s

• Run the python.d.plugin to debug the collector:

  ./python.d.plugin alarms debug trace