The previous implementation treated extra labels (global and rule labels) as
separate label set to returned time series labels. Hence, time series always contained
only original labels and alert ID was generated from sorted labels key-values.
Extra labels didn't affect the generated ID and were applied on the following actions:
- templating for Summary and Annotations;
- persisting state via remote write;
- restoring state via remote read.
Such behaviour caused difficulties on restore procedure because extra labels had to be dropped
before checking the alert ID, but that not always worked. Consider the case when expression
returns the following time series `up{job="foo"}` and rule has extra label `job=bar`.
This would mean that restored alert ID will be always different to the real time series because
of collision.
To solve the situation extra labels are now always applied beforehand and `vmalert` doesn't
store original labels anymore. However, this could result into a new error situation.
Consider the case when expression returns two time series `up{job="foo"}` and `up{job="baz"}`,
while rule has extra label `job=bar`. In such case, applying extra labels will result into
two identical time series and `vmalert` will return error:
`result contains metrics with the same labelset after applying rule labels`
https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics/VictoriaMetrics/issues/870
Label `alertgroup` was introduced in #611 and automatically added to generated
time series. By mistake, this new label wasn't correctly purged on restore event
and affected alert's ID uniqueness. This commit removes `alertgroup` label
in restore function.
https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics/VictoriaMetrics/issues/870
`external.label` flag supposed to help to distinguish alert or recording rules
source in situations when more than one `vmalert` runs for the same datasource
or AlertManager.
The feature allows to speed up group rules execution by
executing them concurrently.
Change also contains README changes to reflect configuration
details.
* vmalert: Add recording rules support.
Recording rules support required additional service refactoring since
it wasn't planned to support them from the very beginning. The list
of changes is following:
* new entity RecordingRule was added for writing results of MetricsQL
expressions into remote storage;
* interface Rule now unites both recording and alerting rules;
* configuration parser was moved to separate package and now performs
more strict validation;
* new endpoint for listing all groups and rules in json format was added;
* evaluation interval may be set to every particular group;
* vmalert: uncomment tests
* vmalert: rm outdated TODO
* vmalert: fix typos in README
