Setup Server

Siren binary contains both the CLI client and the server itself. Each has it's own configuration in order to run. Server configuration contains information such as database credentials, log severity, etc. while CLI client configuration only has configuration about which server to connect.

Server

Pre-requisites

Dependencies

• PostgreSQL
• CortexMetrics

You need to prepare and run above dependencies first before running Siren. Siren also has a docker-compose.yaml file in its repo that has all required dependencies. If you are interested to use it, you just need to git clone the repo and run docker-compose up in the root project.

Initialization

This steps assumes all dependencies already up and running. Create a server config config.yaml file (siren server init) in the root folder of siren project or use --config flag to customize to a certain config file location or you can also use environment variables to provide the server config.

Setup up a database in postgres and provide the details in the DB field as given in the example below. For the purpose of this tutorial, we'll assume that the username is postgres, database name is siren_development, host and port are localhost and 5432.

db:
  driver: postgres
  url: postgres://postgres:@localhost:5432/siren_development?sslmode=disable
  ...
service:
  host: localhost
  port: 8080
  encryption_key: _ENCRYPTIONKEY_OF_32_CHARACTERS_
log:
  level: info
  gcp_compatible: true
providers:
  cortex:
    group_wait: 30s
    webhook_base_api: http://host.docker.internal:8080/v1beta1/alerts/cortex
receivers:
  slack:
    ...

We are using CortexMetrics as a provider. We need to set the webhook_base_api in providers.cortex config. If you are using the dockerized CortexMetrics with Docker Desktop, you could put the value as http://host.docker.internal:8080/v1beta1/alerts/cortex. This will enable CortexMetrics inside container to talk with Siren in our host machine later. If you are running CortexMetrics inside your host, you could put the value as http://localhost:8080/v1beta1/alerts/cortex.

You also might want to set the provider.cortex.group_wait value to 1s so alert will be sent to the webhook immediately once it was triggered.

If you're new to YAML and want to learn more, see Learn YAML in Y minutes.

Starting the server

Database migration is required during the first server initialization. In addition, re-running the migration command might be needed in a new release to apply the new schema changes (if any). It's safer to always re-run the migration script before deploying/starting a new release.

To initialize the database schema, Run Migrations with the following command:

$ siren server migrate

To run the Siren server use command:

$ siren server start

Using --config flag

$ siren server migrate --config=<path-to-file>

$ siren server start --config=<path-to-file>

Using environment variables

All the configs can be passed as environment variables using underscore _ as the delimiter between nested keys. See the following examples

db:
  driver: postgres
  url: postgres://postgres:@localhost:5432/siren_development?sslmode=disable
service:
  host: localhost
  port: 8080
  encryption_key: _ENCRYPTIONKEY_OF_32_CHARACTERS_

Here is the corresponding environment variable for the above

Configuration key	Environment variable
db.driver	DB_DRIVER
db.url	DB_URL
service.host	SERVICE_HOST
service.port	SERVICE_PORT
service.encryption_key	SERVICE_ENCRYPTION_KEY

Set the env variable using export

$ export SERVICE_PORT=8080

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CLI Client

Initialization

Siren CLI supports CLI client to communicate with a Siren server. To initialize the client configuration, run the following command:

$ siren config init

A yaml file will be created in the ~/.config/gotocompany/siren.yaml directory. Open this file to configure the host for Siren server as in the example below:

host: "localhost:8080"