Show HN: Keep – Open-source alerting CLI | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Keep – Open-source alerting CLI

github.com

65 pointstalboren17 comments

Hi Hacker News! Shahar and Tal from Keep here.

We're thrilled to announce that we're open-sourcing our alerting CLI tool, Keep (https://github.com/keephq/keep). Designed by developers for developers, Keep streamlines and simplifies alerting, making it a first-class citizen within the development process.

Think of Keep as Prometheus Alertmanager but for all observability tools, with a simple and intuitive (GitHub actions-like) syntax.

We believe that alerting has historically been neglected in existing monitoring platforms, leading to subpar alerting practices. With Keep, we aim to change that.

Although it's still in its early stages, we would love to get your feedback on our project.

Keep provides the following key features:

1. Declarative alerting that can be easily managed and versioned in your version control and service repository.

2. Alerts from multiple data sources for added context and insights.

3. Freedom from vendor lock-in, making it easier to switch to a different observability tool if needed.

Some of the features we plan to add in the future include:

- Integration with CI/CD processes to simplify alerts maintenance and testing.

- Scoring system to assess the alert's urgency and provide relevant information.

- Slack integration to keep track of alerts over time.

- More providers, conditions, and other enhancements.

We invite you to give Keep a try (https://github.com/keephq/keep) and share your thoughts with us. Your feedback will help us make Keep the best it can be.

Open articleView on HN

It took me a while to understand what your tool is doing. It looks like an abstraction layer for concrete monitoring/alerting solutions.

What confuses me is:

- You introduce Keep like this "Think of Keep as Prometheus Alertmanager but for all observability tools", but then there is no Alertmanager provider. Is this planned?

- You mention that you support the 3 hyperscaler clouds (AWS, ...), yet I do not see any examples or code that backs this up

- You mention that Keep can be used to _test_ alerts. How? Examples? Otherwise make it clear that you _plan_ that Keep can do this at some point.

In general though it looks very interesting :).

thanks for your feedback @mshekow! why was it hard to understand what Keep does? lack of some concrete examples maybe?

Regarding your questions:

- Working on the Grafana/Prometheus provider and it'll be shipped in <1 week

- AWS and GCP are in final tests, we thought we could release that before it gets any traction ^^" anyway, PRs will be available in <2 days

- There are two things here: 1. You can simply test if your alert "triggers" just by running the CLI with the --verbose and --alerts-file 2. We plan on adding tests that will both allow you to "mock" the alert to see that it acts as you planned & source control integrated (e.g. a GitHub action) tests that will tell you when a code change breaks your alerts

anyway, if you have any other questions/thoughts, feel free to open an issue and we'll address it right away

hey now, this is a scoped, focused enough "Zapier for developers" that it might actually succeed because you focus where the YC companies refused to. nice job!

thanks swyx! any use cases/features you can think of that would make you use this as your alerting go-to?

no but its more bc i dont run many production applications. a small easy to deploy thing for batching up and texting me of 404's and 500's on my Netlify site would be nice but is really a luxury because i could just check my netlify analytics but i dont

haha i see ^^', anyway, if you considering alerting any anytime, i can hook you up with whatever alert use case that you'd like ;)

will do, appreciate it

I have to admit that I'm not up to date on what's out there in this space, but this seems like a pretty useful tool.

Is there or will there be a UI to show all of the things you're monitoring?

Absolutely! We're working on the UI side of Keep; our general idea is to help organizations fight the "alert-fatigue" problem. The UI will allow you to connect with your existing monitoring/alerting tools, see all your alerts in a centric place, and get valuable insights about the alerts you already have/new ones

Hi guys, congrats on the launch. I wondered where can I store or observe my alerts. I was just confused since it is open-source.

Hey @EgeAytin, Shahar here. Not 100% sure I understand your question but:

1. You can keep (pun intended) the actual alert YAMLs wherever you like, the CLI gets the alert as an argument.

2. If by observe you mean a UI where you can see all your alerts, this is something we're currently working on.

3. In the upcoming days we will also release "deployment" options so you can click-to-production with your alerts.

Would love to help more if you're still struggling

The keep (pun) should be used more skillfully than this.

Source: I am the cofounder of www.trykeep.com

I asked for 2. and 3. thanks for clarifying.

This seems to be a more advanced version of https://ntfy.sh

I think it's more like ntfy could be a notification provider for keep. I just opened an GitHub issue with that request.

thanks for that, we’re on it

will do!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com