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Put enrichment where its data and responsibility live. Compute metric-derived facts and rule-specific context in Prometheus alert rules. Use Alertmanager for grouping, deduplication, routing, suppression, and receiver-specific message formatting. Add incident ownership, escalation state, responder actions, and other workflow context in an incident-management platform after an alert enters that workflow.

This split follows the documented roles of the three components rather than a universal vendor mandate. The right boundary depends on when the data becomes available, whether it must affect alert identity or routing, how many receivers need it, and which system can keep it accurate.

The responsibility boundary in one view

Prometheus determines whether an alert is active by evaluating an expression. An alerting rule can attach labels and annotations, and its templates can use alert labels, external labels, and the evaluated value. Prometheus documentation describes annotations as the place for longer information such as descriptions and runbook links. See Prometheus alerting rules.

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Alertmanager receives those alerts and controls delivery behavior. It groups related alerts, deduplicates repeats, routes groups to receivers, and supports silences and inhibition. Its notification templates shape the message sent to each receiver; these responsibilities are described in the Alertmanager documentation and notification template reference.

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An incident-management tool is downstream and workflow-oriented. It can receive events through Alertmanager integrations, then add ownership, escalation, incident state, acknowledgements, responder coordination, and post-page actions. The exact functions depend on the product and plan. Prometheus lists integrations including incident.io and PagerDuty in its notification integrations catalog; PagerDuty documents receiving Prometheus events through Alertmanager in its Prometheus integration guide.

“Prometheus’s alerting rules are good at figuring what is broken right now, but they are not a fully-fledged notification solution.”

That statement in the official rules documentation captures the practical dividing line: Prometheus decides what is firing; Alertmanager decides how it is delivered; an incident system manages what people do about it.

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Choose the layer by the kind of enrichment

Enrichment need Best starting point Reason
Facts computed from metrics or rule evaluation Prometheus Rules evaluate expressions and can template labels and annotations from the result.
Stable alert identity and routing attributes Prometheus labels The label set identifies an alert instance and is used by Alertmanager for deduplication and routing.
Human-readable summary, description, dashboard or runbook URL Prometheus annotations Annotations are intended for supporting information and longer text.
Grouping, deduplication, suppression, and route selection Alertmanager These are Alertmanager’s documented delivery responsibilities.
Different message formats for email, chat, webhooks, or paging receivers Alertmanager templates and receiver configuration Notification templates construct outgoing messages for each receiver.
Ownership, escalation, incident state, and responder workflow Incident-management platform Those facts concern the incident lifecycle after delivery; capabilities vary by service and plan.

Ask five questions before choosing a location:

  • Which system owns the source data?
  • At what point is the data available: during rule evaluation, while routing, or only after a page creates an incident?
  • Must the value change alert identity, grouping, or routing?
  • Do all receivers need the same value, or does each destination need a different presentation?
  • Which component can refresh the value and remain correct when an optional dependency is unavailable?

What belongs in Prometheus alert rules

Metric-derived facts and firing logic

Keep facts that can be calculated from the time series alongside the expression that decides whether the alert fires. Examples include the current error ratio, a saturation percentage, a latency quantile, a threshold that was exceeded, or the affected cluster selected by the rule. Keeping this context with the rule makes the alert understandable even if it is delivered to a receiver that does not perform additional lookups.

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Labels for identity, grouping, and routing

Labels are part of the alert label set. Alertmanager uses that set to identify and deduplicate alert instances and can match labels in routing rules. Use labels for stable dimensions such as alertname, service, environment, region, and severity. Do not put changing prose, dashboard URLs, timestamps, request IDs, or other high-cardinality values in labels: every change can create a different alert identity and defeat grouping or deduplication. The distinction between labels and annotations is visible in the Alertmanager Alerts API.

Annotations for explanations and links

Put a concise summary, a longer description, impact wording, and links to a runbook or dashboard in annotations. Annotations can be templated from alert labels, external labels, and the evaluated value. A typical rule keeps routing dimensions in labels and explanatory text in annotations:

groups:
- name: api-availability
  rules:
  - alert: ApiErrorRateHigh
    expr: rate(http_requests_total{job="api" status=~"5.."}[5m]) / rate(http_requests_total{job="api"}[5m]) > 0.05
    for: 10m
    labels:
      service: api
      environment: production
      severity: page
    annotations:
      summary: "API 5xx rate is high in {{ $labels.environment }}"
      description: "{{ $value | humanizePercentage }} of API requests returned 5xx responses for 10 minutes."
      runbook_url: "https://example.com/runbooks/api-error-rate"

The example’s label values are deliberately stable. The evaluated value and prose remain annotations, where they can inform a responder without changing the alert’s identity.

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When a Prometheus lookup is the wrong fit

If enrichment requires a ticketing record, current on-call assignment, deployment metadata, or another system that Prometheus does not own, do not force that lookup into the rule expression. Decide whether the alert must have the information before routing. If it does, provide it through a maintained metric or exporter and document its freshness; if it does not, attach it later in Alertmanager or the incident system.

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What belongs in Alertmanager

Delivery behavior, not new truth

Alertmanager is the right place to decide which alerts travel together, where they go, and when they should be suppressed. Grouping reduces a burst of related alerts to a manageable notification. Deduplication prevents repeated notifications for the same alert set. Routes select receivers by labels. Silences temporarily mute matching alerts, and inhibition suppresses lower-priority notifications when a related higher-priority alert is active. These are documented Alertmanager functions, not properties of Prometheus rule evaluation.

Receiver-specific message construction

A chat message may need a short title and links, while an email may include a table of labels and annotations. Alertmanager notification templates expose alert data and receiver context so each destination can receive an appropriate representation. Keep the underlying facts in Prometheus annotations, then format them per receiver rather than maintaining separate copies of the same description.

Prometheus templating and Alertmanager notification templating are separate mechanisms. A variable or function available in a rule template is not automatically available in a notification template. Check the rule-template documentation and the notification-template reference for the syntax and data exposed at each stage.

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External enrichment through a webhook

Alertmanager includes a generic webhook integration as well as named integrations. A webhook can call an internal service that looks up deployment, ownership, or asset data and returns or forwards a formatted notification. This is useful when the lookup is needed for delivery but is not part of the alert’s identity. It also adds a service to deploy, secure, monitor, and troubleshoot, so use it only when the requirement justifies that operational cost.

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What belongs in an incident-management tool

Lifecycle and human-response context

Once an alert becomes an incident, the relevant enrichment often concerns people and state: the current owner, escalation policy, acknowledgement, related responders, incident severity, open or resolved status, and links to collaboration or status updates. Those values change as people act, so storing them as static Prometheus annotations would make them stale. Keep them in the system that owns the incident lifecycle.

Do not duplicate stable rule facts unnecessarily

An incident platform should receive the alert name, labels, annotations, timestamps, and source links it needs to present the event. It should not become a second authoring system for every runbook sentence or threshold explanation. If a rule description changes, the source of truth should be the rule or runbook; the incident record can retain the received snapshot and a link back to the current documentation.

Integration scope and availability

Prometheus’s integration catalog names incident.io and PagerDuty among supported notification destinations. These entries establish integration paths, not a requirement to adopt a paid incident platform. Pricing, regional availability, retention, escalation features, and API limits are not established here and must be checked in the chosen service’s current documentation.

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Decide whether enrichment happens before or after routing

Question Enrich before Alertmanager routes Enrich after an incident is created
Does the value determine receiver or severity? Yes. Make it available as a stable label or routing input. No. Keep it out of routing and add it to the incident record.
Is the value a metric result or rule-specific explanation? Prometheus rule labels or annotations. Only copy it later if the incident view needs a snapshot.
Does it depend on ownership or acknowledgement? Usually unavailable at rule time. Incident platform is the natural owner.
Can the lookup fail without losing the page? Use only if a failure-safe path exists. Prefer optional post-creation enrichment when the lookup is nonessential.
Do different receivers need different wording? Keep facts in annotations. Use Alertmanager templates for presentation, then incident templates for workflow views.

A useful default is to make the initial notification self-sufficient: include the alert name, affected service and environment, severity, a concise symptom, and a runbook or dashboard link. Treat extra lookups as optional so a slow or failed enrichment dependency cannot block a time-critical page.

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A practical implementation sequence

  1. Define the alert identity. In the Prometheus rule, choose stable labels for service, environment, region, severity, and any dimension that must affect grouping or routing.
  2. Write the rule-local context. Add a summary, description, evaluated value, impact statement, and runbook or dashboard URL as annotations. Verify the template variables in the Prometheus rules documentation.
  3. Test the alert output. Inspect the resulting label set and annotations through the Alertmanager API. Confirm that changing explanatory text does not create a new identity while changing an intended routing label does.
  4. Configure Alertmanager behavior. Set grouping keys, routes, receivers, silences, and inhibition rules. Keep routing decisions based on stable labels rather than annotation prose.
  5. Format each receiver. Use Alertmanager notification templates to select the fields and layout appropriate for email, chat, webhook, or paging destinations.
  6. Add workflow enrichment downstream. Map the alert into the incident platform, then attach ownership, escalation, acknowledgement, and responder actions there. Preserve links to the source dashboard and runbook.
  7. Exercise failure paths. Disable or delay the optional enrichment service and verify that Alertmanager still sends a useful initial notification. Restore the dependency and confirm that later context can be added without creating duplicate incidents.

Common failure modes and fixes

Routing labels contain changing prose

Symptom: one underlying problem creates many alerts or groups because a label includes a changing value. Fix: move the sentence, URL, or measured value to an annotation and retain only stable identity dimensions in labels.

A template variable renders empty

Symptom: a notification shows a blank field even though the rule appears correct. Fix: check which templating engine is running. Prometheus rule templates and Alertmanager notification templates have different inputs and functions; consult their respective references rather than copying syntax between them.

An enrichment outage blocks paging

Symptom: a lookup service times out and the alert is delayed or discarded. Fix: make the lookup non-blocking or post-incident, set bounded timeouts, and ensure the base notification contains enough information to start response.

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Incident records disagree with the rule

Symptom: the incident platform contains an outdated owner, threshold, or description. Fix: keep stable rule facts in Prometheus, lifecycle state in the incident system, and include source links so responders can distinguish a received snapshot from current documentation.

A custom webhook becomes an unowned critical service

Symptom: teams cannot tell who operates the enrichment component or how it fails. Fix: document its owner, authentication, timeout behavior, retry policy, metrics, and fallback notification. Remove it if Alertmanager templates or native integrations meet the requirement.

Validation checklist

  • The rule fires based on a clearly testable Prometheus expression.
  • Labels are stable, low-cardinality, and sufficient for grouping and routing.
  • Annotations contain human-readable context and links without changing alert identity.
  • Alertmanager grouping, deduplication, silencing, inhibition, and routing rules have been tested with representative alert bursts.
  • Each receiver’s template has been tested with firing, resolved, and partially populated alerts.
  • Optional external lookups cannot prevent the base page from being delivered.
  • Incident ownership and escalation are maintained in the incident-management platform, not copied into static rule labels.
  • Every dashboard, runbook, webhook, and integration URL is monitored for access and validity.

The resulting architecture is intentionally layered: Prometheus supplies accurate rule facts, Alertmanager controls notification behavior, and the incident system records and advances the human response. Move a field only when its owner, timing, or routing requirement changes.

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