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Configure high availability

Grafana Alerting uses the Prometheus model of separating the evaluation of alert rules from the delivering of notifications. In this model, the evaluation of alert rules is done in the alert generator and the delivering of notifications is done in the alert receiver. In Grafana Alerting, the alert generator is the Scheduler and the receiver is the Alertmanager.

High availability
High availability

When running multiple instances of Grafana, all alert rules are evaluated on all instances. You can think of the evaluation of alert rules as being duplicated by the number of running Grafana instances. This is how Grafana Alerting makes sure that as long as at least one Grafana instance is working, alert rules will still be evaluated and notifications for alerts will still be sent.

You can find this duplication in state history and it is a good way to confirm if you are using high availability.

While the alert generator evaluates all alert rules on all instances, the alert receiver makes a best-effort attempt to avoid sending duplicate notifications. Alertmanager chooses availability over consistency, which may result in occasional duplicated or out-of-order notifications. It takes the opinion that duplicate or out-of-order notifications are better than no notifications.

The Alertmanager uses a gossip protocol to share information about notifications between Grafana instances. It also gossips silences, which means a silence created on one Grafana instance is replicated to all other Grafana instances. Both notifications and silences are persisted to the database periodically, and during graceful shut down.

Note

If using a mix of execute_alerts=false and execute_alerts=true on the HA nodes, since the alert state is not shared amongst the Grafana instances, the instances with execute_alerts=false will not show any alert status. This is because the HA settings (ha_peers, etc), only apply to the alert notification delivery (i.e. de-duplication of alert notifications, and silences, as mentioned above).

Enable alerting high availability using Memberlist

Before you begin

Since gossiping of notifications and silences uses both TCP and UDP port 9094, ensure that each Grafana instance is able to accept incoming connections on these ports.

To enable high availability support:

  1. In your custom configuration file ($WORKING_DIR/conf/custom.ini), go to the [unified_alerting] section.
  2. Set [ha_peers] to the number of hosts for each Grafana instance in the cluster (using a format of host:port), for example, ha_peers=10.0.0.5:9094,10.0.0.6:9094,10.0.0.7:9094. You must have at least one (1) Grafana instance added to the ha_peers section.
  3. Set [ha_listen_address] to the instance IP address using a format of host:port (or the Pod’s IP in the case of using Kubernetes). By default, it is set to listen to all interfaces (0.0.0.0).
  4. Set [ha_peer_timeout] in the [unified_alerting] section of the custom.ini to specify the time to wait for an instance to send a notification via the Alertmanager. The default value is 15s, but it may increase if Grafana servers are located in different geographic regions or if the network latency between them is high.

Enable alerting high availability using Redis

As an alternative to Memberlist, you can use Redis for high availability. This is useful if you want to have a central database for HA and cannot support the meshing of all Grafana servers.

  1. Make sure you have a redis server that supports pub/sub. If you use a proxy in front of your redis cluster, make sure the proxy supports pub/sub.
  2. In your custom configuration file ($WORKING_DIR/conf/custom.ini), go to the [unified_alerting] section.
  3. Set ha_redis_address to the redis server address Grafana should connect to.
  4. Optional: Set the username and password if authentication is enabled on the redis server using ha_redis_username and ha_redis_password.
  5. Optional: Set ha_redis_prefix to something unique if you plan to share the redis server with multiple Grafana instances.

The following metrics can be used for meta monitoring, exposed by Grafana’s /metrics endpoint:

MetricDescription
alertmanager_cluster_messages_received_totalTotal number of cluster messages received.
alertmanager_cluster_messages_received_size_totalTotal size of cluster messages received.
alertmanager_cluster_messages_sent_totalTotal number of cluster messages sent.
alertmanager_cluster_messages_sent_size_totalTotal number of cluster messages received.
alertmanager_cluster_messages_publish_failures_totalTotal number of messages that failed to be published.
alertmanager_cluster_membersNumber indicating current number of members in cluster.
alertmanager_peer_positionPosition the Alertmanager instance believes it’s in. The position determines a peer’s behavior in the cluster.
alertmanager_cluster_pings_secondsHistogram of latencies for ping messages.
alertmanager_cluster_pings_failures_totalTotal number of failed pings.

Enable alerting high availability using Kubernetes

  1. You can expose the pod IP through an environment variable via the container definition.

    yaml
    env:
      - name: POD_IP
        valueFrom:
          fieldRef:
            fieldPath: status.podIP
  2. Add the port 9094 to the Grafana deployment:

    yaml
    ports:
      - containerPort: 3000
        name: http-grafana
        protocol: TCP
      - containerPort: 9094
        name: grafana-alert
        protocol: TCP
  3. Add the environment variables to the Grafana deployment:

    yaml
    env:
      - name: POD_IP
        valueFrom:
          fieldRef:
            fieldPath: status.podIP
  4. Create a headless service that returns the pod IP instead of the service IP, which is what the ha_peers need:

    yaml
    apiVersion: v1
    kind: Service
    metadata:
      name: grafana-alerting
      namespace: grafana
      labels:
        app.kubernetes.io/name: grafana-alerting
        app.kubernetes.io/part-of: grafana
    spec:
      type: ClusterIP
      clusterIP: 'None'
      ports:
        - port: 9094
      selector:
        app: grafana
  5. Make sure your grafana deployment has the label matching the selector, e.g. app:grafana:

  6. Add in the grafana.ini:

    bash
    [unified_alerting]
    enabled = true
    ha_listen_address = "${POD_IP}:9094"
    ha_peers = "grafana-alerting.grafana:9094"
    ha_advertise_address = "${POD_IP}:9094"
    ha_peer_timeout = 15s