alerts/annotation

This check can be used to enforce annotations on alerting rules.

Configuration

Syntax:

annotation "$pattern" {
  comment  = "..."
  severity = "bug|warning|info"
  token    = "(.*)"
  value    = "(.*)"
  values   = ["...", ...]
  required = true|false
}

• $pattern - regexp pattern to match annotation name on, this can be templated to reference checked rule fields, see Configuration for details.
• comment - set a custom comment that will be added to reported problems.
• severity - set custom severity for reported issues, defaults to a warning.
• token - optional regexp to tokenize annotation value before validating it. By default the whole annotation value is validated against value regexp or the values list. If you want to break the value into sub-strings and validate each of them independently you can do this by setting token to a regexp that captures a single sub-string.
• value - optional value regexp to enforce, if not set only pint will only check if the annotation exists.
• values - optional list of allowed values - this is alternative to using. value regexp. Set this to the list of all possible valid annotation values.
• required - if true pint will require every rule to have this annotation set, if false it will only check values where annotation is set.

How to enable it

This check is not enabled by default as it requires explicit configuration to work. To enable it add one or more rule {...} blocks and specify all required annotations there.

Example set of rules that will:

• require summary annotation to be present, if missing it will be reported as a warning
• if a dashboard annotation is provided it must match https://grafana\.example\.com/.+ pattern, if it doesn’t match that pattern it will be reported as a bug

rule {
  match {
    kind = "alerting"
  }

  annotation "summary" {
    required = true
  }

  annotation "dashboard" {
    severity = "bug"
    comment  = "You must add a link do a Grafana dashboard showing impact of this alert"
    value    = "https://grafana\.example\.com/.+"
  }
}

Example that enforces all alerting rules with non-zero for field to have an annotation called alert_for and value equal to for field.

rule {
  match {
    for = "> 0"
  }

  annotation "alert_for" {
    required = true
    value    = "{{ $for }}"
  }
}

If you have an annotation that can contain multiple different values as a single string, for example components: "db api memcached", and you want to ensure only valid values are included then use token and values. By setting token to a regexp that matches only a sequence of letters ([a-zA-Z]+) you tell pint to split "db api memcached" into ["db", "api", "memcached"]. Then it iterates this list and checks each element independently. This allows you to have validation for multi-value strings.

rule {
  annotation "components" {
    required = true
    token    = "[a-zA-Z]+"
    values   = [
      "prometheus",
      "db",
      "memcached",
      "api",
      "storage",
    ]
  }
}

How to disable it

You can disable this check globally by adding this config block:

checks {
  disabled = ["alerts/annotations"]
}

You can also disable it for all rules inside given file by adding a comment anywhere in that file. Example:

# pint file/disable alerts/annotation

Or you can disable it per rule by adding a comment to it. Example:

# pint disable alerts/annotation

If you want to disable only individual instances of this check you can add a more specific comment.

If value is NOT set

groups:
  - name: ...
    rules:
    # pint disable alerts/annotation($pattern:$required)
    - record: ...
      expr: ...

Example rule:

annotation "summary" {
  required = true
}

Example comment disabling that rule:

# pint disable alerts/annotation(summary:true)

If value is set

groups:
  - name: ...
    rules:
    # pint disable alerts/annotation($pattern:$value:$required)
    - record: ...
      expr: ...

Example rule:

annotation "dashboard" {
  severity = "bug"
  value    = "https://grafana\.example\.com/.+"
}

Example comment disabling that rule:

# pint disable alerts/annotation(dashboard:https://grafana\.example\.com/.+:true)

How to snooze it

You can disable this check until given time by adding a comment to it. Example:

# pint snooze $TIMESTAMP alerts/annotation

Where $TIMESTAMP is either use RFC3339 formatted or YYYY-MM-DD. Adding this comment will disable alerts/annotation until $TIMESTAMP, after that check will be re-enabled.