Create a discard notifier

In Chronosphere Observability Platform, the discard notifier discards all notifications. Use it to silence a subset of routes without deleting them, hold a place in a notification policy while you restructure routing, or test notification policy behavior without delivering alerts.

Terminology

Observability Platform includes a discard notifier type on the notifier form. Chronoctl and the Chronosphere API represent it with discard: true. The Terraform provider declares a chronosphere_blackhole_alert_notifier resource because it has no chronosphere_discard_* resource. For the discard notifier type, the following text appears in the notifier form:

A discard notifier, also known as a blackhole notifier, does not send any notifications.

A discard notifier drops notifications before they leave the alerting pipeline. Don’t set discard: true on the same notifier as another integration, for example email or slack. An email notifier with a destination such as blackhole@example.com still uses the email integration. It isn’t a discard notifier. To silence alerts without email delivery, create a discard notifier and add it to a notification policy. Select from the following methods to create a discard notifier.

Web
Chronoctl
Terraform
API

To create a discard notifier:

In the navigation menu, select Alerting > Notifiers.
Click Create notifier.
Enter a descriptive name for the notifier.
Select Discard as the type of notifier you want to create.
Click Save.

A discard notifier has no delivery settings to configure.When you edit an existing notifier and switch to the discard notifier type, saving replaces the previous configuration. That configuration can’t be recovered.

To create one or more notifiers using Chronoctl, create a YAML file that defines them and apply the configuration to your instance.

You can use the notifiers scaffold command to generate an example notifier, and then copy the resource definition for your notifier type:

chronoctl notifiers scaffold

Define the resource definition for your discard notifier:
Chronoctl example
api_version: v1/config kind: Notifier spec: name: NAME slug: SLUG discard: true
Replace the following:
- NAME: A descriptive name, such as Example discard.
- SLUG: A unique identifier, such as example-discard.
Apply the changes:
chronoctl apply -f FILE_NAME.yaml
Replace FILE_NAME with the name of your notifier YAML file.

To create a discard notifier:

Create a discard notifier with Terraform by using the chronosphere_blackhole_alert_notifier type followed by a name in a resource declaration:
Terraform example
resource "chronosphere_blackhole_alert_notifier" "discard" { name = "Example discard" }
Run terraform apply to create the notifier resource.
terraform apply

To complete this action with the Chronosphere API, set discard to true in the CreateNotifier endpoint.Because the Chronosphere API requires authentication, include an API token with your curl request, as shown in the following example. For more details, see Create an API token.

export CHRONOSPHERE_API_TOKEN="TOKEN"
export CHRONOSPHERE_DOMAIN="INSTANCE.chronosphere.io"

curl -H "API-Token: ${CHRONOSPHERE_API_TOKEN}" \
     -X METHOD "https://${CHRONOSPHERE_DOMAIN}/ENDPOINT_PATH"

Replace the following:

TOKEN: Your API token.
INSTANCE: The subdomain name for your organization’s Observability Platform instance.
METHOD: The HTTP method to use with the request, such as GET or POST.
ENDPOINT_PATH: The specific endpoint you want to access.

Route alerts to a discard notifier

After you create a discard notifier, attach it to a notification policy so matching monitors send warning or critical alerts to that notifier. Select from the following methods to route alerts to a discard notifier.

Web
Chronoctl
Terraform

In the navigation menu, select Alerting > Notification Policies.
Create a notification policy or open the policy you want to change.
For Warning alert notifiers, Critical alert notifiers, or both, select your discard notifier.
Click Save.

Monitors that use this notification policy send notifications to the discard notifier for the severities you configured.

Reference the discard notifier by slug in the policy’s notifier_slugs lists. For example, a policy that sends both warning and critical alerts to the discard notifier with slug example-discard:

Chronoctl example

api_version: v1/config
kind: NotificationPolicy
spec:
  slug: silence-noisy-alerts
  name: Silence noisy alerts
  routes:
    defaults:
      warn:
        notifier_slugs:
          - example-discard
      critical:
        notifier_slugs:
          - example-discard

Apply the policy YAML:
chronoctl apply -f FILE_NAME.yaml
Replace FILE_NAME with the name of your notification policy YAML file.

Add the discard notifier to route blocks on a chronosphere_notification_policy resource:

Terraform example

resource "chronosphere_notification_policy" "silence_noisy" {
  name = "Silence noisy alerts"

  route {
    severity  = "warn"
    notifiers = [chronosphere_blackhole_alert_notifier.discard.id]
  }

  route {
    severity  = "critical"
    notifiers = [chronosphere_blackhole_alert_notifier.discard.id]
  }
}

Run terraform apply to update the notification policy resource.
terraform apply

Observability Platform

Telemetry Pipeline

More information

Terminology

Route alerts to a discard notifier

​Terminology

​Route alerts to a discard notifier

Terminology

Route alerts to a discard notifier