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Why is everyone okay with relying on Slack for sensitive communication or even business critical stuff like monitoring? It lacks everything a good alerting sys
by lima 10y ago
Why is everyone okay with relying on Slack for sensitive communication or even business critical stuff like monitoring?
It lacks everything a good alerting system has (acknowledgements, fine-grained notifications...).
Even those addresses in the stacktraces could be sensitive in other situations since they contain ASLR offsets.
- notheguyouthink 10y agoWhat would you suggest? We're in need of an alerting platform and making use of Slack, not because it's flawless or anything, but because we're already paying for it and it's convenient for the mass junk. Ie, not strictly mission critical alerts. What medium might be better than Slack? (to be clear, i'm asking, not saying Slack is good for this)
- amyjess 10y agoZabbix. It's open-source and pretty flexible. I maintain my company's Zabbix installation, and I've come to appreciate it (and 3.x finally has a non-ugly UI!).
- lima 10y agoWe use Nagios + CheckMK, but I believe neither this nor Zabbix solve the alerting part. Our solution is a custom notification broker that decides whom to alert and then waits for an acknowledgement. It uses different backends including our company chat. Not complicated at all, just 100 lines of Python code that contain the business logic. Anything that relies on a single medium is unsuitable for anything but unimportant alerts. What if Slack goes down for 2 hour? Unlikely, but definitely possible. This ensures that every alert is explicitly acknowledged by someone, and that unimportant alerts are quickly forgotten without wondering whether someone handled them or not. We have different applications sending alerts, not just Nagios (because Nagios sucks at processing events as opposed to states), and it would quickly become unmanageable without some sort of middleware.
- daveguy 10y agoIs it something where the business logic part could be easily abstracted / separated? It sounds like an interesting and useful yet simple tool. The open source community can always use more of those. Edit: or maybe something like a blog post to describe the structural details.
- lima 10y agoWould need some clean-up but sure, why not. Ask again in a month or so :)
- deathanatos 10y agoActually, the PagerDuty integration for Slack allows in-Slack acknowledgement (and/or resolution) of alerts. (we used this in addition to, not in lieu of, the pagerduty dashboard itself, as well as mobile notification via pagerduty, and Nagio's web UI.) > fine-grained notifications what do you mean by this, out of curiosity?
- lima 10y agoWith PagerDuty on top it's fine from an operational point of view (you'll still have to trust both PagerDuty and Slack to keep your data secure). > fine-grained notifications A common approach is having a "alerts" channel that grabs everyones attention, even though most alerts are only relevant for a small subset of people. A company-wide #general channel is bad enough, and an #alerts channel only makes it worse. You can totally do this with Slack by having something like PagerDuty in-between. We use a custom-written alerting broker that makes it easier to correctly handle some of the more complicated cases but it's pretty much the same idea.
- pavel_lishin 10y agoIf your company is large enough to have alerts that aren't universally applicable, it makes sense to create different channels for different alerts, grouped however you want.
- lima 10y agoTotally agree, it's exactly what we do. The broker sits in between and decide which alert goes where.