Get phone and SMS alerts fromSensu Go
Sensu Go runs checks against your hosts and services and passes every result through a pipeline of filters and handlers. Add a Spike handler and each failing check becomes an incident — phone call, SMS, Slack or email to whoever is on call, escalating until someone answers.
Set up with AI
I use Sensu Go for monitoring and Spike for on-call and incident management. Walk me through connecting them: create a Sensu Go integration in Spike, copy its webhook URL, and add that webhook to Sensu Go alert settings. Then help me send a test alert to confirm incidents show up in Spike.
What is Sensu Go?
Sensu Go is an open-source observability pipeline. Agents on your hosts, and proxy entities for things that cannot run an agent, run checks on a schedule and report each result as an event. A pipeline then filters, transforms and hands those events to handlers — which is where notifications, ticketing and metrics storage are plugged in.
On its own, a Sensu handler that sends email or a chat message is easy to miss at night. Pointed at Spike, the same failing check becomes an incident: the engineer who is on call is phoned and texted, and if nobody acknowledges it, the escalation policy hands it to the next responder.
Spike keys the incident on the entity’s namespace, the entity it ran for and the check name, so a check that keeps failing, or moves from warning to critical, stays one incident. The title is the check’s own output — “CheckCPU TOTAL CRITICAL: total=96.12 …” — trimmed to its first line, and when the check returns status 0 the recovery event resolves the incident. If an event arrives without an entity or check name, Spike falls back to a plain title built from whichever name is present. Repeats still join that incident, but without both names nothing proves a recovery is about the same alert, so it never resolves the incident on its own. Alert routing rules can then send a critical database check to one team and a warning to another.
How to set up Sensu Go alerts
Every Spike integration is a unique webhook URL. Paste it into Sensu Go and alerts start flowing — no agents, no code.
Step 1: Create a Sensu Go integration in Spike
In your Spike dashboard, open Integrations and choose Sensu Go. Spike generates a unique webhook URL for this integration — copy it, and attach the integration to the service and escalation policy that should answer Sensu's alerts.
Step 2: Create a pipe handler in Sensu Go
Create it with sensuctl handler create spike --type pipe, and set its command to a curl call that posts the event from standard input to your Spike URL as JSON. The handler receives the event as JSON on stdin, so no template is needed.
Step 3: Put the handler in a pipeline
Write a pipeline resource that runs the Spike handler after the built-in is_incident filter, so that failing checks and their recoveries reach Spike and routine passing results do not, and apply it with sensuctl create.
Step 4: Attach the pipeline to your checks
Open each check that should page with sensuctl edit check and add the pipeline to its pipelines list. When a check fails, the incident opens in Spike within seconds.
Step 5: Let recoveries close the incident
Spike matches an event on the entity's namespace, entity name and check name, so repeated failures of the same check on the same host join the open incident instead of paging again. When the check returns to status 0, the recovery event resolves it.
That's it — Sensu Go alerts now page whoever is on call.
