Using Hawkular Alerts as a standalone engine

A blog post by Lucas Ponce

Hawkular Alerts is a component of the Hawkular project. It’s goal is to provide flexible and scalable alerting services in a easily consumable way. Some of Hawkular Alerts features are:

Flexible, multi-condition Triggers.
Powerful "Dampening" to control your alert firing rate .
Simple Alert Life-cycle management.
Automated Trigger disable and enable.
Automated Alert Resolution by detecting the end of your alerting event.
Pluggable Action and Notification capabilities to act on your alerts.
Complete REST API for Definition and Execution.
Optional standalone deployment or get added value with Hawkular Metrics or Hawkular.
Multi-platform deployment as a J2EE WAR file on JBoss WildFly.

Standalone deployments

One of the possibilities of the deployments is to use Alerts as a standalone component.

In this scenario, the engine can run on an Wildfly server and we can interact via Java or REST API to create alerts definitions or feed data.

Details of how to install and configure Hawkular Alerts can be found in the component documentation.

Hello World

Let’s start using Hawkular Alerts with a small example.

We are going to create an alert definition like this:

TRIGGER trigger-for-poc
WHEN
    data-x < 5 AND data-y > 5
HAPPENS
    2 consecutive times
THEN
    EMAIL to:admin-group@hawkular.org,cc:cc-group@hawkular.org

from this script create-definitions.sh.

In the example, we create a trigger with two conditions that is linked with an email action for alert notifications.

Now that we have the definitions created on the engine, next step will be to send data to evaluate the conditions.

For this example we are going to use directly the REST API from a bash script send-data.sh.

The example sends random data to the engine, triggering alerts when two consecutive evaluations of the conditions happens, then an email notification is sent with the action details.

We have created a short demo showing the whole scenario.

This example is quite simple and its goal is to show the flexibility to use the engine.

More details about Hawkular Alerts features can be found at

Feel free to try out the latest release for yourself on your own applications. If you have any questions or comments, please contact us on these channels.

If you have suggestions for features/enhancements, or find any bugs, then please log an issue in the project jira.

Published by Lucas Ponce on 19 August 2015