Grafana Contact Points

Grafana Contact Points

Grafana is part of the a9s Prometheus installations and is used by the Application Developers to visualize metrics from various sources and also to receive alerts based on these metrics. With Grafana 8 the Unified Alerting was introduced which is also available in the a9s Prometheus Data Service.

An essential part of this alerting system is the configuration for Contact points. Grafana supports several notifiers by default. These notifiers can be configured by the user of the Service Instance via the Grafana Dashboard. Only the SMTP settings need to be configured via the BOSH release, which is the base for each Service Instance.

Manual configuration on a per-instance basis is not recommended because the settings are overwritten each time the Service Instance is updated via the a9s Service Broker. A more reliable approach is to create an OPS file that is applied when each Service Instance is created or updated. This way, a global SMTP configuration is available for sending emails in all service instances.

The Ops file below can be used to configure SMTP and must be applied when the a9s Prometheus Service Instance is deployed. After that, the deployment-updater errand must be run to apply the settings to existing Service Instances.

- type: replace
  path: /instance_groups/name=templates-uploader/jobs/name=template-uploader/properties/template-uploader/template-custom-ops?
  value: |
    - type: replace
      path: /instance_groups/name=grafana/jobs/name=grafana/properties/grafana/smtp?
      value:
        enabled: true
        host:
        user:
        password:
        ssl_cert:
        ssl_key:
        skip_verify:
        from_address:
        from_name:
        ehlo_identity:  # EHLO identity in SMTP dialog (defaults to instance_name)