DocumentationGrafana MimirReferencesArchitectureComponents(Optional) Alertmanager

(Optional) Grafana Mimir Alertmanager

The Mimir Alertmanager adds multi-tenancy support and horizontal scalability to the Prometheus Alertmanager. The Mimir Alertmanager is an optional component that accepts alert notifications from the Mimir ruler. The Alertmanager deduplicates and groups alert notifications, and routes them to a notification channel, such as email, PagerDuty, or OpsGenie.

Multi-tenancy

Like other Mimir components, multi-tenancy in the Mimir Alertmanager uses the tenant ID header. Each tenant has an isolated alert routing configuration and Alertmanager UI.

Tenant configurations

Each tenant has an Alertmanager configuration that defines notifications receivers and alerting routes. The Mimir Alertmanager uses the same configuration file that the Prometheus Alertmanager uses.

You can validate a configuration file using the mimirtool command:

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mimirtool alertmanager verify <ALERTMANAGER CONFIGURATION FILE>

The following sample command shows how to upload a tenant’s Alertmanager configuration using mimirtool:

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mimirtool alertmanager load <ALERTMANAGER CONFIGURATION FILE>  \
  --address=<ALERTMANAGER URL>
  --id=<TENANT ID>

The following sample command shows how to retrieve a tenant’s Alertmanager configuration using mimirtool:

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mimirtool alertmanager get \
  --address=<ALERTMANAGER URL>
  --id=<TENANT ID>

The following sample commands shows how to delete a tenant’s Alertmanager configuration using mimirtool:

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mimirtool alertmanager delete \
  --address=<ALERTMANAGER URL>
  --id=<TENANT ID>

After the tenant uploads an Alertmanager configuration, the tenant can access the Alertmanager UI at the /alertmanager endpoint.

Fallback configuration

When a tenant doesn’t have a Alertmanager configuration, the Grafana Mimir Alertmanager uses a fallback configuration. By default, there is always a fallback configuration set. You can overwrite the default fallback configuration via the -alertmanager.configs.fallback command-line flag.

Tenant limits

The Grafana Mimir Alertmanager has a number of per-tenant limits documented in limits. Each Mimir Alertmanager limit configuration parameter has an alertmanager prefix.

Alertmanager UI

The Mimir Alertmanager exposes the same web UI as the Prometheus Alertmanager at the /alertmanager endpoint.

When running Grafana Mimir with multi-tenancy enabled, the Alertmanager requires that any HTTP request include the tenant ID header. Tenants only see alerts sent to their Alertmanager.

For a complete reference of the tenant ID header and Alertmanager endpoints, refer to HTTP API.

You can configure the HTTP path prefix for the UI and the HTTP API:

• -http.alertmanager-http-prefix configures the path prefix for Alertmanager endpoints.
• -alertmanager.web.external-url configures the source URLs generated in Alertmanager alerts and from where to fetch web assets.

Using a reverse proxy

When using a reverse proxy, use the following settings when you configure the HTTP path:

• Set -http.alertmanager-http-prefix to match the proxy path in your reverse proxy configuration.
• Set -alertmanager.web.external-url to the URL served by your reverse proxy.

Templating

The Mimir Alertmanager adds some custom template functions to the default ones of the Prometheus Alertmanager.

Sharding and replication

The Alertmanager shards and replicates alerts by tenant. Sharding requires that the number of Alertmanager replicas is greater-than or equal-to the replication factor configured by the -alertmanager.sharding-ring.replication-factor flag.

Grafana Mimir Alertmanager replicas use a hash ring that is stored in the KV store to discover their peers. This means that any Mimir Alertmanager replica can respond to any API or UI request for any tenant. If the Mimir Alertmanager replica receiving the HTTP request doesn’t own the tenant to which the request belongs, the request is internally routed to the appropriate replica.

To configure the Alertmanagers’ hash ring, refer to configuring hash rings.

State

The Mimir Alertmanager stores the alerts state on local disk at the location configured using -alertmanager.storage.path.

The Mimir Alertmanager also periodically stores the alert state in the storage backend configured with -alertmanager-storage.backend. When an Alertmanager starts, it attempts to load the alerts state for a given tenant from other Alertmanager replicas. If the load from other Alertmanager replicas fails, the Alertmanager falls back to the state that is periodically stored in the storage backend.

In the event of a cluster outage, this fallback mechanism recovers the backup of the previous state. Because backups are taken periodically, this fallback mechanism does not guarantee that the most recent state is restored.

Ruler configuration

You must configure the ruler with the addresses of Alertmanagers via the -ruler.alertmanager-url flag.

Point the address to Alertmanager’s API. You can configure Alertmanager’s API prefix via the -http.alertmanager-http-prefix flag, which defaults to /alertmanager. For example, if Alertmanager is listening at http://mimir-alertmanager.namespace.svc.cluster.local and it is using the default API prefix, set -ruler.alertmanager-url to http://mimir-alertmanager.namespace.svc.cluster.local/alertmanager.

Enable UTF-8

In effort to support alerts from OpenTelemetry (OTel) data, Prometheus Alertmanager has added support for UTF-8. This is supported as an opt-in feature for the Grafana Mimir Alertmanager in Mimir versions 2.12 and later.

For new Mimir installations, enable support for UTF-8 before creating any tenant configurations. You can do this by changing utf8-strict-mode-enabled to true.

For existing Mimir installations, there are a number of breaking changes that might affect existing tenant configurations. Follow these instructions to ensure all existing tenant configurations are compatible with UTF-8 before enabling it.

What are the breaking changes?

In order to support UTF-8, Alertmanager has added a new parser for label matchers (often abbreviated as matchers), which has a number of breaking changes.

Grafana Mimir provides a number of tools to help you identify whether any existing tenant configurations are affected by these breaking changes, and to migrate any affected tenant configurations in a way that is backwards-compatible, doesn’t change the behavior of existing matchers, and works even in Mimir installations that do not have UTF-8 enabled.

Identify affected tenant configurations

To identify affected tenant configurations, take the following steps:

1. Make sure Mimir is running version 2.12 or later with debug-level logging enabled.

2. To identify any tenant configurations that are incompatible with UTF-8 (meaning the tenant configuration fails to load and the fallback configuration is used instead), search Mimir server logs for lines containing Alertmanager is moving to a new parser for labels and matchers, and this input is incompatible. Each log line includes the invalid matcher from the tenant configuration and the ID of the affected tenant. For example:

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   msg="Alertmanager is moving to a new parser for labels and matchers, and this input is incompatible. Alertmanager has instead parsed the input using the classic matchers parser as a fallback. To make this input compatible with the UTF-8 matchers parser please make sure all regular expressions and values are double-quoted. If you are still seeing this message please open an issue." input="foo=" err="end of input: expected label value" suggestion="foo=\"\"" user="1"

   In this example, the tenant with User ID 1 has an incompatible matcher in their tenant configuration foo= and should to be changed to the suggestion foo="".

3. To identify any tenant configurations that are compatible with UTF-8 but contain matchers that might change in behavior when its enabled, search Mimir server logs for lines containing Matchers input has disagreement. Disagreement occurs when a matcher is valid, but due to adding support for UTF-8, it can behave differently when UTF-8 is enabled.

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   msg="Matchers input has disagreement" input="foo=\"\\xf0\\x9f\\x99\\x82\"" user="1"

Fix tenant configurations

To fix any identified tenant configurations, take the following steps:

1. Use the migrate-utf8 command in mimirtool to fix any tenant configurations that are incompatible with UTF-8. This command can migrate existing tenant configurations in a way that is backwards-compatible, doesn’t change the behavior of existing matchers, and works even in Mimir installations that don’t have UTF-8 enabled. If you cannot use mimirtool, you can edit tenant configurations by hand through applying each suggestion from the Mimir server logs.

2. You must look at tenant configurations that have disagreement on a case-by-case basis. Depending on the nature of the disagreement, you might not need to fix a matcher with disagreement. For example \xf0\x9f\x99\x82 is the byte sequence for the 🙂 emoji. If the intention is to match a literal 🙂 emoji then no change is required. However, if the intention is to match the literal \xf0\x9f\x99\x82 then you need to change the matcher to use \\xf0\\x9f\\x99\\x82 instead.

Final steps

1. After identifying and fixing all affected tenant configurations, check the Mimir server logs again to make sure you haven’t missed any tenant configurations.

2. You can now enable UTF-8 by setting utf8-strict-mode-enabled to true.

3. Any incompatible tenant configurations will fail to load. You can identify if any tenant configurations are failing to load by searching the Mimir server logs for lines containing error applying config, or querying the alertmanager_config_last_reload_successful gauage for 0.

4. You can disable debug-level logging.