Alerts fingerprint

[Federico Buti]

Hi all.

We are interested in organizing alerts in a persistent storage for querying them later since Stack is quite unpractical for that.

We were considering using the "fingerprint" as a unique identifier for each alert but I've found inconsistent statements on the Internet about its uniqueness.

Is the fingerprint unique or to which degree can it be considered unique?

Thanks,

F.

[l.mi...@gmail.com]

Depends what you mean by "unique".
AFAIR fingerprint is computed from alerts labels, so unique means here: a unique combination of labels.

It's not unique as an "event" - if alert fires, then resolves and then fires again that both old and newly firing alerts will have same fingerprint.

So an alert with same combination of labels should have same fingerprint for every occurrence of that alert.

[l.mi...@gmail.com]

That's assuming that I'm correct here, which seems to be the case following the code:

https://github.com/prometheus/common/blob/317b7b125e8fddda956d0c9574e5f03f438ed5bc/model/alert.go#L50

->

https://github.com/prometheus/common/blob/317b7b125e8fddda956d0c9574e5f03f438ed5bc/model/labelset.go#L143

->

https://github.com/prometheus/common/blob/317b7b125e8fddda956d0c9574e5f03f438ed5bc/model/signature.go#L56

[Brian Candler]

As an aside: active alerts already get stored as extra timeseries in prometheus (ALERTS and ALERTS_FOR_STATE), so they are already in a form of persistent storage :-)

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/PrometheusAlertStartTimeStuff

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52480567/count-alerts-fired-by-prometheus

[baca...@gmail.com]

Thanks all for the quick reply!

That's the clear, definitive information we were searching for. :-)

Cheers,

F.