Creating Alerters

To create your own Alerter, you need to:

1. Create a Python file in simplemonitor/Alerters (or pick a suitable existing one to add it to)

2. If you’re creating a new file, you’ll need a couple of imports:

   from ..Monitors.monitor import Monitor
   from .alerter import Alerter, AlertLength, AlertType, register
   

3. Define your alerter class, which should subclass Alerter and be decorated by @register. Set a class attribute for the “type” which will be used in the alerter configuration to use it.

   @register
   class MyAlerter(Alerter):
   
       alerter_type = "my_alerter"
   

4. Define your initialiser. It should call the superclass’s initialiser, and then read its configuration values from the supplied dict. You can also do any other initialisation here.

   This code should be safe to re-run, as if SimpleMonitor reloads its configuration, it will call __init__() with the new configuration dict. Use the get_config_option() helper to read config values.

   @register
   class MyAlerter(Alerter):
   
       alerter_type = "my_alerter"
   
       def __init__(self, config_options: dict) -> None:
           super().__init__(config_options)
           self.my_setting = self.get_config_option("setting", required=True)
   

5. Add a send_alerter function. This receives the information for a single monitor. You should first call self.should_alert(monitor), which will return the type of alert to be sent (e.g. failure). You should return if it is AlertType.NONE.

   You should then prepare your message. Call self.build_message() to generate the message content. Check the value of self._dry_run and if it is True, you should log (using self.alerter_logger.info(...)) what you would do, else you should do it.

   Alerter.build_message(length: AlertLength, alert_type: AlertType, monitor: Monitor) → str

   Generate a suitable length alert message for the given type of alert, for the given Monitor.

   Parameters

   • AlertLength – one of the AlertLength enum values: NOTIFICATION (shortest), SMS (will be <= 140 chars), ONELINE, TERSE (not currently supported), FULL, or ESSAY

   • AlertType – one of the AlertType enum values: NONE, FAILURE, CATCHUP, or SUCCESS

   • monitor – the Monitor to generate the message for

   Returns

   the built message

   Return type

   str

   Raises

   • ValueError – if the AlertType is unknown

   • NotImplementedError – if the AlertLength is unknown or unsupported

7. You should also give a _describe_action function, which explains what this alerter does. Note that the time configuration for the alerter will be automatically added:

   @register
   class MyAlerter(Alerter):
   
       # ...
   
       def _describe_action(self) -> str:
           return f"sending FooAlerters to {self.recipient}"
   

7. In simplemonitor/Alerters/__init__.py, add your Alerter to the list of imports.

That’s it! You should now be able to use type=my_alerter in your Alerters configuration to use your alerter.