Managing Alerts

Hawkular Services

Hawkular Alerts is an alert engine that is distributed as part of Hawkular Services.

Information on how to install and run Hawkular Services can be found on the Hawkular website.

Use of Hawkular Alerts is currently via its REST API. Information on this API can be found here.

Configuring APM to send events to Hawkular Alerts

Hawkular APM can be configured to send events to Hawkular Alerts, to be evaluated based on trigger conditions configured by the end user.

Prior to starting the Hawkular APM server, the following environment variables should be specified:

Name

Description

HAWKULAR_URI

The URL of the Hawkular Services server

HAWKULAR_USERNAME

The username for authenticating against the Hawkular Services server

HAWKULAR_PASSWORD

The password for authenticating against the Hawkular Services server

Event Types

All events generated from Hawkular APM will have the following fields in common:

  • The dataId will represent the event type

  • The dataSource will represent the hostname where the event originated. For some events, this may not be relevant (i.e. if associated with multiple hosts) and therefore will be left blank

  • The category will always be APM

Currently Hawkular APM will send the following events to the Alerts engine:

Trace Completion Time

The dataId for this event type is TraceCompletionTime.

These events represent the completion time associated with an end to end trace instance (i.e. a business transaction instance).

For example, if an end user invokes your application to place an order, and that request results in various messages being passed between your backend services (e.g. inventory, credit checking, customer service, etc) then all of these subsequent service invocations are associated with a single trace instance triggered by the initial user request.

The event will also include any properties that are associated with the trace instance defined as tags. If a property had multiple values, then the tag will have a comma separated list of those values.