Viewing AlertManager Email Alerts via MailHog
After adding AlertManager to my Prometheus test stack in a previous post I spent some time triggering different failiure cases and generating test messages. While it’s slightly satisfying seeing rows change from green to red I soon wanted to actually send real alerts, with all their values somewhere I could easily view. My criteria were:
- must be easy to integrate with AlertManager
- must not require external network access
- must be easy to use from docker-compose
- should have as few moving parts as possible
A few short web searches later I stumbled back onto a small server I’ve used for this in the past - MailHog. MailHog is an awesome little server that listens for SMTP traffic and then displays it using an internal HTTP server. It has sensible defaults so no configuration was required, comes as a single binary and even has a working dockerhub image. My solution was found!
The amount of work to include it was even less than I’d hoped. A new
docker-compose.yaml file for mailhog itself, a very
basic AlertManager
configuration
file and a few lines of docker config to put the right configs in each of the
containers later and we have a working email alert view:
