Summary

This was an extensive chapter, and we covered a lot of ground. Observability is becoming a large, important technology sector and Grafana is keeping up by making its alerting capabilities more powerful and versatile.

In this chapter, we set up monitoring for both Docker and NGINX using InfluxDB as a data source. We created alert rules to query and analyze the data from our monitoring, used expressions to reduce the data to a single value, and created expressions to evaluate that value for violating conditions that might need to trigger an alert. We integrated Grafana contact points with email, PagerDuty, and Slack to receive our alerts with messages that contain annotation data set by our alert rules evaluation behavior. We also established notification policies to route our alert messages to different contact points based on the severity derived from alert rule labels. Finally, we briefly considered how to set up mute timings for when we might want to disable certain alert...