Prometheus tells you what broke. Nerve helps with what next.

Architecture

Alertmanager should remain the source of alert truth. Nerve should not replace labels, inhibition, silences, or grouping. The integration point is not a direct Nerve webhook: Alertmanager posts JSON to your local receiver or bridge, then the bridge formats a short message and calls nerve send. That keeps the e2e model intact because encryption happens on your side before the Nerve relay.

Route only page-worthy alerts

In this example, 127.0.0.1:8099 is not the public Nerve API. It is a small service running next to Alertmanager or inside your private network. If the bridge runs on another host, use an internal HTTPS URL reachable by Alertmanager.

route:
  receiver: default
  routes:
    - matchers:
        - severity="critical"
      receiver: nerve-phone

receivers:
  - name: nerve-phone
    webhook_configs:
      - url: http://127.0.0.1:8099/alertmanager
        send_resolved: true

Where e2e encryption happens

Alertmanager does not encrypt payloads for Nerve by itself. The bridge receives the Alertmanager webhook, drops noisy or sensitive labels, builds a short text payload, and runs echo "$TEXT" | nerve send with NERVE_DSN from its own environment. The Nerve relay sees only the encrypted envelope and delivery metadata.

Action mapping

Do not map every alert to a fix. Map only stable alerts to reviewed actions.

Bridge payload

[{{ .Status }}] {{ .CommonLabels.alertname }}
severity={{ .CommonLabels.severity }}
instance={{ .CommonLabels.instance }}
runbook={{ .CommonAnnotations.runbook_url }}

When not to offer an action

Some alerts should only page a human. Do not attach a remediation button to unknown symptoms, data-loss risks, security alerts, or alerts that fire across many services at once. A useful Nerve action should reduce toil without hiding the incident.

Audit fields

For every approved action, log the Alertmanager fingerprint, action name, target host, pipe, approver identity, start time, exit code, and short output. That audit trail makes later incident review possible.

Safe remediation checklist

• Keep only the local bridge URL in Alertmanager config; keep the sender DSN in the bridge environment.
• Run the agent on the host or network segment where actions are allowed.
• Keep action wrappers small and reviewable.
• Prefer read-only diagnostics before mutation.
• Keep Alertmanager silences and resolved notifications intact.

Related guides