Deduplication of generic alerts
Problem to solve
Often times an alert can fire multiple times over the course of a single incident. Monitoring tools vary in their de-duplication and grouping functionality. If the same alert fires and is sent to GitLab while an associated incident is open, it should not create a new incident. We should detect this scenario to reduce the amount of noise and issue clutter, when automatic issue creation is enabled.
Intended users
Sasha the Software Developer
Devon the DevOps Engineer
Sidney the Systems Administrator
Further details
This work contributes to the Incident Management Vision
Proposal
We will need to have a unique identifier on alerts, probably specific to each monitoring tool. We will identify if there is an open issue in GitLab with the same identifier. If there is, the alert gets posted in the issue discussion as a comment that is collapsible. If there is not, a new issue is created.