What is alert routing, and how do you send different alerts to different teams? [Intermediate]
Answer
Alert routing maps alerts to receivers based on labels. I route by team, service, severity, environment, and sometimes region so that the right owner receives the alert through the right channel.
Technical explanation
Routing requires consistent alert labels; missing team or service labels usually cause paging chaos.
Severity should control channel: page, ticket, chat, or email.
Routes should have a safe default receiver for unmatched alerts, but the goal is to eliminate unmatched production alerts.
Hands-on example
Alertmanager sketch:
route:
receiver: platform-default
routes:
- matchers: [team='payments', severity='page']
receiver: payments-pager
- matchers: [team='payments', severity='ticket']
receiver: payments-jira
- matchers: [environment='dev']
receiver: dev-slack
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