This CloudFormation template can be used to easily deploy Alerta as a single instance Auto-Scaling Group behind a Elastic Load Balancer in an AWS VPC using RDS Postgres as the backend database.
For help, join
- VPC with at least two public subnets
- Google Tracking ID (optional)
The following table lists the Cloudformation template parameters that can be set. There are sensible defaults where possible.
| Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
| VpcId | ID of the VPC into which to launch the application eg. vpc-1234abcd |
| Subnets | Public subnets to use in VPC for internet-facing ELB, instances and RDS eg. subnet-abcd1234 |
| InstanceType | EC2 Instance type eg. t2.micro, t2.small or t2.medium (default: t2.micro) |
| KeyName | Name of an existing EC2 KeyPair for SSH access |
| SSHLocation | IP range that can be used to SSH to the EC2 instances (default: 0.0.0.0/0) |
| SecretKey | Application secret key eg. any random string |
| AllowedDomain | Allowed email domain eg. gmail.com or example.com (default: '*') |
| TrackingId | Google analytics tracking Id (optional) |
| DBName | Postgres database name (default: monitoring) |
| DBUser | Username for database access |
| DBPassword | Password for database access |
| DBInstanceClass | The database instance type (default: db.t2.micro) |
| DBAllocatedStorage | The size of the database (Gb) |
| MultiAZ | Multi-AZ master database (true/false) |
Use the AWS management console to launch the stack using the Amazon S3 template URL https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/alerta/public/cloudformation/alerta.yaml
To launch the stack from the command-line use the aws command. The following
command shows the minimum stack parameters that must be defined to launch the
stack:
$ aws cloudformation create-stack \
--stack-name AlertaStack \
--template-body file://alerta.yaml \
--parameters \
ParameterKey=VpcId,ParameterValue=vpcfffd0f9a \
ParameterKey=Subnets,ParameterValue=\"subnet-0fa00c78,subnet-2ee56c4b\" \
ParameterKey=SecretKey,ParameterValue=supersecret \
ParameterKey=DBUser,ParameterValue=alerta \
ParameterKey=DBPassword,ParameterValue=mypassword \
--tags Key=Role,Value=monitoring Key=Owner,Value=DevOps
Note: The Subnets parameter value must be a comma-delimited string surrounded
by escaped quotes otherwise it will be interpreted as a string and the command
will fail with an Invalid type for parameter error.
The Alerta Web UI is available at the following:
http://<elb-ip-address>
And the Alerta API is available at the following:
http://<elb-ip-address>/api
The exact values are dependent on the actual deployment and can be found in the CloudFormation "Outputs" tab of the AWS console once the Alerta stack has been successfully created.
There are many improvements that should be made to this template before it is used in a production environment. These include, but are not limited to:
- using private VPC subnets for the web servers and database instances
- copying the web console static assets to S3 and serving them from Cloudfront
- creating an SSL certificate and using HTTPS instead of HTTP
These and other enhancements are specific to every deployment environment so this is left as an exercise for the reader.
Copyright (c) 2015-2016,2018 Nick Satterly. Available under the MIT License.