Overview

Moira is a real-time alerting tool, based on Graphite data.

Key Features

  • Graphite storage independence

    Some Graphite queries are very ineffective. Tools like Seyren multiply this effect every minute making lots of ineffective queries and overloading your cluster. Moira relies on the incoming metric stream, and has its own fast cache for recent data.

  • Support for (almost) all Graphite functions

    Graphite function library (carbonapi) is embedded directly into Moira source code. You can use any function and get predictable results, like in your Graphite or Grafana dashboards.

  • Support for custom expressions

    If simple warning/error threshold is not enough, you can write flexible govaluate expressions to calculate trigger state based on metric data.

  • Tags for triggers and subscriptions

    When several teams/services share one monitoring tool, it is essential to provide some way of filtering triggers and subscriptions in the UI. Moira has a flexible tag system.

  • Extendable notification channels

    Moira supports email, Slack, Pushover and many other channels of notification out-of-the-box. But you can always write your own plugin in Go and rebuild Moira Notifier microservice.

  • Alarm fatigue protection

    Sometimes one of your triggers goes mad and switches back and forth between states, sending you hundreds of notifications. Sometimes you just ignore and delete all messages, accidentally also deleting one that is actually important. Moira tries to protect you with a feature called throttling. It’s simple: if one of your triggers starts to send over 10 messages per an hour, Moira limits this trigger to one message per 30 minutes. Alerts from this trigger are combined, and not lost - just packaged into a single message.

Limitations

By default, Moira stores metric history for one hour. This ensures performance under heavy load. You can tweak this in config file, but note that performance will degrade.

In order to reduce database load, Moira checks every single trigger at most once every 5 seconds. Probably, your metrics arrive once every minute, so you really won’t notice this limitation. You can also tweak this in config file.

Microservices

In spirit of Graphite architecture, Moira consists of several loosely coupled microservices. You are welcome to replace or to add new ones.

Filter

Filter is a lightweight service responsible for receiving lots of metric data in Graphite format. It filters received data and saves only metrics that match any of user triggers. This reduces load on all other parts of Moira.

Checker

Checker is an application with embedded Graphite functions. Checker watches for incoming metric values and performs checks according to saved trigger settings. When state of any trigger changes, Checker generates an event.

Notifier

Notifier is an application that watches for generated events. Notifier is responsible for scheduling and sending notifications, observing quiet hours, retrying failed notifications, etc.

API

API is an application that serves as a backend for UI.

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is a frontend React application, it looks like this:

ui screenshot