Alerting Cadence

This document outlines a clean alerting flow for routing notifications from systems to humans. It defines the standard alerting cadence used in professional environments and presents two examples: one SaaS-based using PagerDuty, and one self-hosted using n8n and Pushover.

📐 Conceptual Sequence


\[Monitoring Event] → \[Alert Sink / Webhook] → \[Alert Orchestrator] → \[Notifier] → \[Device]

Monitoring Event: A system generates an alert (e.g., service down).
Alert Sink: A webhook or endpoint receives the alert.
Alert Orchestrator: Manages alert state, deduplication, escalation, etc.
Notifier: Sends the alert (push, SMS, call, etc).
Device: The human-facing endpoint receiving the alert.

📦 Example 1: SaaS Flow (PagerDuty)

Tools:

Monitoring: Prometheus Alertmanager
Alert Sink: Webhook URL provided by PagerDuty
Orchestrator: PagerDuty
Notifier: PagerDuty Mobile App, Email, SMS, etc.
Device: Mobile Phone / Desktop

Sequence:


Prometheus → PagerDuty Webhook → PagerDuty Logic → PagerDuty Push → User

PagerDuty handles on-call schedules, routing, silencing, and escalation policies internally. You define a webhook integration, and Prometheus fires into that endpoint.

🏠 Example 2: Self-Hosted Stack

Tools:

Monitoring: Prometheus Alertmanager
Alert Sink: n8n webhook (or Node-RED, Flask app, etc)
Orchestrator: n8n workflows
Notifier: Pushover (via HTTP node in n8n)
Device: Android / iOS phone with Pushover installed

Sequence:


Prometheus → n8n Webhook → n8n Flow Logic → Pushover API → User Device

In this case, you're orchestrating the routing logic inside n8n. You can do things like:

Add delays and retries
Fan out to multiple notification services
Send escalations if unacknowledged

Pushover Note: Pushover does not provide webhooks for inbound alerts. It acts only as a notification target. You push to it, not the other way around.

Design Considerations

Use webhook-capable tools for modularity.
Deduplication and state tracking (e.g. "alert resolved") are usually handled by the orchestrator.
For self-hosting, consider storing alert state (e.g. with Redis) if escalation or de-duplication logic is needed.
To fan-out to SMS, TTS, etc., integrate services like Twilio or Telegram alongside Pushover.

🔗 Related Tools

Category	Tool Options
Monitoring	Prometheus, Zabbix, Uptime Kuma
Orchestration	PagerDuty, OpsGenie, n8n, Node-RED
Notification	Pushover, Gotify, Twilio, Email, Telegram
Custom Webhook Receivers	Flask, FastAPI, n8n