Mastering SaltStack - Second Edition

Using monitoring states

Monitoring states are one of the less commonly known pieces of functionality inside Salt, and that's a shame. While execution modules are superb for building and maintaining a baseline of information about a machine, monitoring states are designed to raise a notification when a metric falls out of the desired range.

Note

The notification in this case is not the same as an alert. It can be used to raise alerts, but it is an independent action.

As you may recall, there are four pieces of information that will always be returned from each individual state:

• Name
• Result
• Changes
• Comment

Monitoring states differ from standard states in three ways. First of all, they are not allowed to make changes to the system. Their job is to observe ...