What is Alertmanager, and what does it handle that Prometheus does not? [Basic]
Answer
Alertmanager receives alerts from Prometheus and handles deduplication, grouping, routing, silencing, inhibition, and notification delivery. Prometheus detects alert conditions; Alertmanager decides how and when people are notified.
Technical explanation
Routing sends alerts to teams or tools based on labels such as service, team, severity, and environment.
Grouping prevents a flood of separate notifications for related alerts.
Silencing and inhibition suppress expected or redundant alerts without changing alert rules.
Hands-on example
Hands-on: add labels team='payments' and severity='page' to a Prometheus alert. Configure Alertmanager to route team='payments' to the payments PagerDuty receiver, group by alertname and service, and inhibit lower-severity pod alerts when a service-level page is firing.
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