Users and/or organizations have different requirements regarding notification methods; some might be using HipChat as a means of communication, while others rely on email, on-call usually demands a pager system such as PagerDuty or VictorOps, and so on. Thankfully, Alertmanager provides several integration options out of the box and covers most of the notification needs you might have. If not, there's always the Webhook notifier, which allows integration with custom notification methods. Next, we'll be exploring the most common integrations and how to configure them, as well as providing basic examples to get you started.

Something to keep in mind when considering integrating with chat systems is that they're designed for humans, and the use of a ticketing system is advised when thinking about low-priority alerting. When the process of creating alerts is easy and self-service, managing them can quickly get out of control. Tickets ensure accountability: Some of the major advantages of using tickets over alerting on chat channels is that they allow tracking, prioritization, and proper follow-up to ensure that the alerted problem does not happen again. This method also implicitly ensures ownership of notifications and stops the usual who's the owner of this alert? question from arising. Ownership empowers service maintainers to curate the alerts they receive and, as a side effect, also helps reduce alert fatigue.

There is a configuration key that is common to all notifiers, and is called send_resolved. It takes a Boolean (true or false) and declares whether a notification should be sent when an alert is resolved. This is enabled by default for PagerDuty, Opsgenie, VictorOps, Pushover, and the Webhook integration, but disabled for the remaining notifiers, and is the main reason why you should prevent unnecessary spam.