Nightingale is an open-source monitoring project specializing in alerting, designed to complement visualization tools like Grafana. It targets users who have existing data collection infrastructure but require a robust, centralized engine for alarm generation, processing, and distribution. Its primary benefit is providing advanced, configurable alerting capabilities, including AI-assisted management via its MCP-Server.

How It Works

Nightingale connects to existing time-series databases and data sources (e.g., VictoriaMetrics, ElasticSearch) to configure alerting and notification rules. It processes incoming data, generates alarms, and distributes them through various channels. The project recommends Categraf as a data collector, which pushes metrics via Prometheus Remote Write. Nightingale stores monitoring data in a time-series database and provides alerting and visualization capabilities. A key architectural advantage is its distributed deployment mode, ensuring uninterrupted alerting in edge data centers with unreliable network connectivity to central servers.

Quick Start & Requirements

The README does not detail specific installation commands or non-default prerequisites like Python versions or hardware requirements. It recommends using Categraf as a collector and integrating with existing time-series databases. Users are directed to the Nightingale Documentation Site for more information and to submit bugs via the Nightingale GitHub Issue tracker.

Highlighted Details

• Focuses on alerting engine, alarm processing, and distribution, differentiating from Grafana's visualization emphasis.
• Supports 20 built-in notification media and custom message templates, with event pipelines for automated alarm processing.
• Features alerting self-healing, automatically triggering scripts upon alarm generation.
• Natively supports importing Prometheus alerting rules and integrates with multiple data sources (Prometheus, ElasticSearch, Loki, ClickHouse, MySQL, Postgres).
• Offers a distributed deployment mode for edge data centers with poor network connectivity.
• Includes an MCP-Server for AI assistant interaction via natural language for alert management.
• Supports business groups and a permission system for rule management.

Maintenance & Community

Originally developed by DiDi.inc, Nightingale was donated to the China Computer Federation (CCF) Open Source Development Committee (ODTC) on May 11, 2022. The project actively encourages community contributions, bug reports, and feature requests, guided by a community governance draft.

Licensing & Compatibility

Licensed under the Apache License V2.0, which is generally permissive for commercial use and integration into closed-source projects.

Limitations & Caveats

Nightingale is explicitly not designed for unified event consolidation, advanced response handling, data analysis across multiple systems, personnel scheduling, on-call management, or collaborative alert handling. For these specific use cases, external on-call management products like PagerDuty or FlashDuty are recommended.