chore(secrets): point Alertmanager at a real receiver - #31
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ALERTMANAGER_WEBHOOK_URL was still the placeholder from observability.example.yaml — ntfy.example.invalid. Alertmanager had been resolving it on every notification, failing DNS, and giving up after 15 retries. No alert had ever been delivered since the stack was built: all 40 rules were firing into nothing, and AlertmanagerNotificationsFailing was itself undeliverable for the same reason. Now an ntfy.sh topic. External on purpose: the alerting stack runs on the rack it monitors, so a self-hosted receiver would die with the thing it is meant to warn about — including a mains loss, which is the scenario the missing UPS battery makes unrecoverable. The topic is a 20-character random string and functions as a bearer secret, which is why it lives here rather than in a config file. The trade-off is that alert text — hostnames, addresses, roles — transits a third-party server. Switching to a self-hosted or private receiver is one `make secrets-edit` away and needs no other change. Verified end to end: both alerts that had been stuck in the retry queue were delivered on reload. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
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chore(secrets): point Alertmanager at a real receiver
This was referenced Aug 19, 2026
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Makes alerting work at all. It never has.
What changed
ALERTMANAGER_WEBHOOK_URLonly. One key, values encrypted.Why
The webhook was still the placeholder from
observability.example.yaml:ntfy.example.invalid. Alertmanager resolved it on every notification, failedDNS, and gave up after 15 retries:
No alert has ever been delivered since the stack was built. All 40 rules
were firing into nothing.
AlertmanagerNotificationsFailing— the rule whosewhole job is to catch this — was undeliverable for the same reason it was
firing.
Why an external receiver
Deliberate. The alerting stack runs on the rack it monitors, so a self-hosted
receiver dies with the thing it is meant to warn about. That includes a mains
loss, which is precisely the scenario the missing UPS battery makes
unrecoverable — see #30.
The topic is a 20-character random string from
scripts/gen-secret.shandfunctions as a bearer secret, which is why it belongs in SOPS rather than a
config file.
Trade-off, stated plainly: alert text — hostnames, addresses, roles —
transits a third-party server. That is information
SECURITY.mddeliberatelykeeps out of this repository. Moving to a self-hosted or private receiver is one
make secrets-editaway and needs no other change.Blast radius
Secrets file only. No rule, route, receiver definition, service or segmentation
change. The running stack already holds this value.
secrets/*.sops.yamlVerification
make render && make reload, then polled the topic. Both alerts stuck in theretry queue were delivered:
No
notifyerrors in the Alertmanager log since the reload.make validatepassesFollow-up worth knowing
Alertmanager posts raw JSON to a generic webhook, so ntfy renders each alert as
a wall of JSON rather than a readable notification. Functional, not pleasant.
Worth a formatting bridge or ntfy-specific receiver later.