Stop notifications for individual alarms

In this short tutorial, you'll learn how to stop notifications for individual alarms in Netdata's health monitoring system. We also refer to this process as silencing the alarm.

Why silence alarms? We designed Netdata's pre-configured alarms for production systems, so they might not be relevant if you run Netdata on your laptop or a small virtual server. If they're not helpful, they can be a distraction to real issues with health and performance.

Silencing individual alarms is an excellent solution for situations where you're not interested in seeing a specific alarm but don't want to disable a notification system entirely.

Find the alarm configuration file

To silence an alarm, you need to know where to find its configuration file.

Let's use the system.cpu chart as an example. It's the first chart you'll see on most Netdata dashboards.

To figure out which file you need to edit, open up Netdata's dashboard and, click the Alarms button at the top of the dashboard, followed by clicking on the All tab.

In this example, we're looking for the system - cpu entity, which, when opened, looks like this:

In the source row, you see that this chart is getting its configuration from 4@/usr/lib/netdata/conf.d/health.d/cpu.conf. The relevant part of begins at health.d: health.d/cpu.conf. That's the file you need to edit if you want to silence this alarm.

For more information about editing or referencing health configuration files on your system, see the health quickstart.

Edit the file to enable silencing

To edit health.d/cpu.conf, use edit-config from inside of your Netdata configuration directory.

cd /etc/netdata/ # Replace with your Netdata configuration directory, if not /etc/netdata/
./edit-config health.d/cpu.conf

You may need to use sudo or another method of elevating your privileges.

The beginning of the file looks like this:

template: 10min_cpu_usage
 on: system.cpu
 os: linux
 hosts: *
 lookup: average -10m unaligned of user,system,softirq,irq,guest
 units: %
 every: 1m
 warn: $this > (($status >= $WARNING) ? (75) : (85))
 crit: $this > (($status == $CRITICAL) ? (85) : (95))
 delay: down 15m multiplier 1.5 max 1h
 info: average cpu utilization for the last 10 minutes (excluding iowait, nice and steal)
 to: sysadmin

To silence this alarm, change sysadmin to silent.

 to: silent

Use one of the available methods to reload your health configuration and ensure you get no more notifications about that alarm**.

You can add to: silent to any alarm you'd rather not bother you with notifications.

What's next?

You should now know the fundamentals behind silencing any individual alarm in Netdata.

To learn about all of Netdata's health configuration possibilities, visit the health reference guide, or check out other tutorials on health monitoring.

Or, take better control over how you get notified about alarms via the notification system.

You can also use Netdata's Health Management API to control health checks and notifications while Netdata runs. With this API, you can disable health checks during a maintenance window or backup process, for example.