Enabling alert routing for user-defined projects

Enable alert routing for user-defined projects to use the default platform Alertmanager instance or, optionally, a separate Alertmanager instance only for user-defined projects.
Grant users permission to configure alert routing for user-defined projects.

After you complete these steps, developers and other users can configure custom alerts and alert routing for their user-defined projects.

As a cluster administrator, you can enable alert routing for user-defined projects. With this feature, you can allow users with the alert-routing-edit role to configure alert notification routing and receivers for user-defined projects. These notifications are routed by the default Alertmanager instance or, if enabled, an optional Alertmanager instance dedicated to user-defined monitoring.

Users can then create and configure user-defined alert routing by creating or editing the objects for their user-defined projects without the help of an administrator.

After a user has defined alert routing for a user-defined project, user-defined alert notifications are routed as follows:

To the alertmanager-main pods in the openshift-monitoring namespace if using the default platform Alertmanager instance.
To the alertmanager-user-workload pods in the openshift-user-workload-monitoring namespace if you have enabled a separate instance of Alertmanager for user-defined projects.

You can allow users to create user-defined alert routing configurations that use the main platform instance of Alertmanager.

Prerequisites

You have installed the OpenShift CLI (oc).

Procedure

Edit the cluster-monitoring-config ConfigMap object:

Add enableUserAlertmanagerConfig: true in the alertmanagerMain section under data/config.yaml:

apiVersion: v1
metadata:
  name: cluster-monitoring-config
  namespace: openshift-monitoring
  config.yaml: |
    alertmanagerMain:
      enableUserAlertmanagerConfig: true (1)

Save the file to apply the changes.

In some clusters, you might want to deploy a dedicated Alertmanager instance for user-defined projects, which can help reduce the load on the default platform Alertmanager instance and can better separate user-defined alerts from default platform alerts. In these cases, you can optionally enable a separate instance of Alertmanager to send alerts for user-defined projects only.

Prerequisites

You have access to the cluster as a user with the cluster-admin role.
You have enabled monitoring for user-defined projects in the cluster-monitoring-config config map for the openshift-monitoring namespace.
You have installed the OpenShift CLI (oc).

Procedure

Edit the user-workload-monitoring-config ConfigMap object:

Add enabled: true and enableAlertmanagerConfig: true in the alertmanager section under data/config.yaml:

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
data:
  config.yaml: |
    alertmanager:
      enabled: true (1)
      enableAlertmanagerConfig: true (2)

Verification

Verify that the user-workload Alertmanager instance has started:

Example output

NAME            VERSION   REPLICAS   AGE
user-workload   0.24.0    2          100s

You can grant users permission to configure alert routing for user-defined projects.

Prerequisites

You have access to the cluster as a user with the cluster-admin role.
The user account that you are assigning the role to already exists.
You have installed the OpenShift CLI (oc).
You have enabled monitoring for user-defined projects.

Procedure

Assign the alert-routing-edit role to a user in the user-defined project:

Additional resources

Enabling monitoring for user defined projects

Managing alerts