Put enrichment where the needed data and decision already live. Keep metric-derived facts and alert-rule context in Prometheus. Use Alertmanager for grouping, deduplication, routing, suppression, and receiver-specific message formatting. Add incident ownership, escalation, responder activity, and incident-state context in an incident management tool. This split avoids bloated alerts, unstable routing keys, and workflows that cannot be maintained by the system that owns them.
There is no universal rule that every organization must implement the same architecture. The practical boundary follows the documented responsibilities of each component and the point in the alert lifecycle when information becomes available.
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The short answer: match enrichment to responsibility
| Enrichment need | Best starting point | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| Facts calculated from metrics or an alert expression | Prometheus | Alerting rules evaluate expressions and can template labels and annotations. |
| Stable alert identity and routing attributes | Prometheus labels | Labels travel with the alert and are used by Alertmanager for deduplication and routing. |
| Summary, description, runbook URL, dashboard link | Prometheus annotations | Annotations are intended for supporting information rather than alert identity. |
| Grouping, deduplication, inhibition, silencing, and route selection | Alertmanager | These are Alertmanager’s core delivery responsibilities. |
| Different message formats for email, chat, ticket, or webhook receivers | Alertmanager templates and receiver configuration | Notification templates shape the outgoing message after routing decisions. |
| Ownership, escalation, acknowledgements, responder workflow, and incident state | Incident management platform | Those facts depend on the human incident process after an alert is delivered. |
The boundary is easiest to remember as evaluate in Prometheus, deliver in Alertmanager, operate in the incident system.
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How context moves through the alert pipeline
1. Prometheus evaluates the condition
Prometheus alerting rules evaluate an expression and create an alert while that expression is active. A rule can attach labels and annotations, and their values can be templated from alert labels, external labels, and the evaluated value. The official alerting-rules documentation describes annotations such as a longer description and a runbook link as appropriate rule output.
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This is the earliest point at which metric-derived context is authoritative. For example, the rule can identify the affected service, region, instance, measured value, threshold, and a link to the dashboard that explains the condition. If a fact is needed to decide whether the alert exists, it belongs here because the expression and its labels are the source of that decision.
2. Alertmanager decides how to deliver it
Alertmanager receives alerts and applies delivery behavior: it groups related alerts, deduplicates repeated notifications, routes groups to receivers, and supports silences and inhibition. Its responsibilities are documented in the Alertmanager guide. It does not replace Prometheus as the evaluator of the metric condition.
Alertmanager also renders notification content. The notification template reference describes the data available to templates and how messages are constructed for each receiver. This makes Alertmanager the right place to change presentation without changing the alert’s identity.
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3. An incident system manages the response
An incident platform receives a notification and adds workflow state: who owns the incident, who was paged, whether someone acknowledged it, what escalation step is next, and when the incident is resolved. Prometheus lists integrations including incident.io and PagerDuty in its notification integrations catalog; the exact fields and automations depend on the selected service and plan. PagerDuty’s Prometheus integration guide documents receiving Prometheus events through Alertmanager.
These systems are downstream by design. They should not become the sole source of stable rule facts that every receiver needs, because doing so makes a second copy of the monitoring logic responsible for keeping those facts current.
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What belongs in Prometheus
Metric-derived facts and rule-specific context
Put values that are computed by the alert expression, or that explain why that expression fired, in the rule. Typical examples include the observed value, threshold, service, environment, region, instance, symptom, and a link to the relevant dashboard or runbook. These values are available before routing and can therefore be used consistently by every downstream receiver.
Labels for identity, grouping, and routing
Use labels for a small, stable set of machine-readable attributes: alert name, service, environment, severity, region, or team. Alertmanager uses the alert label set when it deduplicates and routes alerts. The Alerts API documentation distinguishes labels from annotations and exposes timestamps and the generator URL as alert data.
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1Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors2Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute3Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsDo not put changing prose, stack traces, request IDs, or other high-cardinality values in labels merely because they are convenient to template. Every distinct label set can become a distinct alert identity, which can defeat grouping and create notification noise. This is an implementation recommendation derived from the documented role of labels, not a separate Prometheus limitation.
Annotations for human-readable explanation
Put summaries, descriptions, runbook URLs, dashboard URLs, and other supporting text in annotations. An annotation can explain the symptom without changing which alert instance Alertmanager considers the same alert. Keep it concise enough for a notification and link to a source of truth for details that change frequently or are too large to copy.
A representative rule
groups:
- name: api.rules
rules:
- alert: ApiErrorRateHigh
expr: rate(http_requests_total{job='api',status=~'5..'}[5m]) / rate(http_requests_total{job='api'}[5m]) > 0.05
for: 10m
labels:
service: api
environment: production
severity: page
team: platform
annotations:
summary: API error rate is high in {{ $labels.instance }}
description: Error rate is {{ $value }} for more than 10 minutes.
runbook_url: https://example.invalid/runbooks/api-error-rate
dashboard_url: https://example.invalid/dashboards/apiThe example separates stable routing keys from explanatory text. Adapt the expression, label names, and URLs to your own metric schema; the important design is the separation of identity and explanation.
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What belongs in Alertmanager
Grouping and deduplication
Group alerts that should appear in one notification, such as several instances of the same service failure. Deduplication prevents repeated delivery of the same alert group while it remains active. Grouping keys should be based on stable labels, not on an annotation whose wording or measured value changes.
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Use the route tree to choose a receiver based on labels such as team, severity, service, or environment. A production page may go to an on-call receiver, while a warning may go to a ticket or chat channel. Keep that policy in Alertmanager so changing a destination does not require rewriting every Prometheus rule.
Silences and inhibition
Maintenance silences and inhibition rules suppress notifications when a broader or more authoritative alert makes a lower-level alert redundant. These are delivery decisions, not evidence that the underlying metric condition is false, so they belong after rule evaluation.
Formatting the same alert for different receivers
One receiver may need a short subject and a link; another may need a structured payload. Alertmanager notification templates can render the same labels and annotations differently for each destination. Keep the underlying facts in Prometheus and use templates for layout, ordering, and receiver-specific presentation.
When an incident management tool should enrich the alert
Ownership and escalation
Ownership can depend on an on-call schedule, vacation override, escalation policy, or current team assignment. Those values change independently of the metric rule, so resolve them in the incident platform rather than hard-coding a person in Prometheus.
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Incident state and responder actions
Acknowledgement, assignment, escalation level, responder notes, related incidents, and resolution timestamps exist only after a notification has entered the response workflow. Prometheus cannot know these facts at rule-evaluation time. The incident platform is the authoritative place to display and mutate them.
Context that becomes available after paging
Some enrichment requires a service catalog lookup, deployment record, ownership database, or recent change list. Decide whether that information is required before routing or merely useful after an incident is created. If it is optional post-page context, let the incident system attach it asynchronously so a slow lookup cannot delay the initial alert.
Do not duplicate stable rule facts
Copying the same runbook URL, severity definition, or metric explanation into a downstream workflow creates drift. Send those values as labels and annotations, then let the incident tool display them. Add only workflow-specific fields that Prometheus and Alertmanager cannot own.
A decision framework for placing new enrichment
For each proposed field, answer these questions in order:
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- When does it become available? Data needed to decide whether an alert is active must exist before or during Prometheus evaluation. Data needed only to choose a receiver can wait for Alertmanager. Data generated by responders necessarily comes later.
- Must it affect identity or routing? Stable machine-readable values that determine grouping or routing belong in labels. Explanatory values should remain annotations or rendered message content.
- How many receivers need it? If every receiver needs the same fact, publish it once in Prometheus. If each receiver needs a different layout, keep the fact stable and format it in Alertmanager.
- What happens when the lookup fails? A required dependency should have a defined fallback. Optional context should fail open: deliver a useful alert and add the missing detail later.
| Example field | Layer | Reason |
|---|---|---|
severity=page |
Prometheus label | Stable routing and grouping attribute. |
| Current error-rate value | Prometheus annotation | Produced by rule evaluation and useful to people. |
| Destination chat channel | Alertmanager route | Delivery policy can change without changing the rule. |
| Short subject line for email | Alertmanager template | Presentation varies by receiver. |
| On-call person at 14:00 UTC | Incident platform | Schedule and ownership are workflow data. |
| Responder acknowledgement time | Incident platform | It exists only after delivery and human action. |
An implementation sequence that keeps failures contained
- Define the alert contract. Choose the labels required for identity, grouping, and routing. Choose annotations for the summary, description, runbook, dashboard, and generator context.
- Implement metric context in the rule. Test the expression and confirm that templated values render as expected. Keep labels bounded and stable.
- Configure Alertmanager policy. Add grouping, routes, silences, inhibition, and receiver templates. Verify that routing uses labels rather than changing prose.
- Pass the complete alert to the incident platform. Preserve labels, annotations, timestamps, and the generator URL where the integration supports them. Map stable fields to the platform’s routing or deduplication keys.
- Add workflow enrichment downstream. Resolve schedules, ownership, escalation, related incidents, and responder actions in the incident system.
- Exercise the failure path. Temporarily make an optional catalog or service lookup unavailable. Confirm that the initial notification still contains the alert name, severity, affected service, observed symptom, and a usable link.
- Review drift. When a field changes, update the system that owns it. Avoid maintaining a second manually edited copy in a notification template or incident playbook.
Template boundaries and common implementation mistakes
Confusing Prometheus and Alertmanager template languages
Prometheus rule templating and Alertmanager notification templating are separate mechanisms with different inputs and execution points. A variable available while a rule evaluates is not automatically available in a receiver template. Consult the Prometheus rule documentation for rule fields and the Alertmanager notification reference for message-template data.
Putting prose in labels
A sentence that changes with every measurement creates new label values and undermines deduplication. Keep prose in annotations and render it in the notification.
Using Alertmanager as a metric calculator
Alertmanager can select, group, suppress, and format alerts; it is not the place to recreate PromQL calculations. Compute the fact once in the rule and pass the result downstream.
Blocking delivery on enrichment
An outbound enrichment service or webhook can fail, time out, or become the new outage. Alertmanager supports a generic webhook integration, so a custom enrichment service is possible, but it adds another component to operate. Use it only for a requirement that cannot be met by rule annotations, Alertmanager templates, or the incident platform, and design a timeout and fallback payload.
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Copying large, volatile context
Logs, deployment histories, and full dependency graphs change quickly and can exceed receiver limits. Include a concise statement and a link to the authoritative dashboard, runbook, service record, or incident timeline instead.
Troubleshooting by symptom
| Symptom | Likely placement problem | Correction |
|---|---|---|
| Every measurement creates a new alert notification | Changing values were put in labels. | Move them to annotations and keep identity labels stable. |
| The same alert is formatted incorrectly for one receiver | Presentation was hard-coded in the rule. | Keep the annotation factual and change the Alertmanager receiver template. |
| Routing changes require editing many rules | Destination policy is duplicated in Prometheus. | Route by stable labels in Alertmanager. |
| The page is delayed when a catalog is unavailable | Optional enrichment is on the critical delivery path. | Send the base alert first and attach context asynchronously. |
| Prometheus rule text renders but the notification is blank | Template variables from one layer were used in another. | Check each layer’s documented inputs and syntax. |
| Responders see stale ownership | On-call data was copied into a static rule or template. | Resolve current ownership in the incident platform. |
What the official component boundary implies
Prometheus documentation summarizes the boundary directly: "Prometheus’s alerting rules are good at figuring what is broken right now, but they are not a fully-fledged notification solution." Notification dispatch is assigned to Alertmanager. That statement supports a division in which Prometheus supplies evidence and context, Alertmanager controls delivery behavior, and a downstream incident system manages the human response.
Use that division as a default, then make exceptions only when a concrete data-ownership or timing requirement justifies them. The most reliable alert is one that remains actionable even when optional enrichment is unavailable.
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