Scope and limits

AlertINT is deliberately focused. The boundaries below are design decisions, not gaps — knowing them up front saves you from misconfigured expectations.

Design principles#

• Read-only by design — AlertINT observes and reports. It never touches your infrastructure, so teams can adopt it without risk. The one write an agent can make is feedback into AlertINT's own incident record — additive, audit-chained, local.
• Self-hosted and local — your alert data and incident context stay on your machine.
• Fair Source — the runtime and all baseline and community packs are Fair Source under the FSL-1.1-ALv2 license: free to read, use, modify, and self-host at any scale, with each release converting to Apache 2.0 — full open source — two years after it ships. Paid tiers come later and sit on top, never inside the engine: a hosted control plane for teams (fleet management, SSO/RBAC, audit retention — metadata only, your alert data never leaves your network) and enterprise connectors.

Today's boundaries#

AlertINT triages — it doesn't act. It won't remediate, silence, or re-route alerts, run scripts or runbooks, or page ticketing systems for you. Several of these are natural future directions — remediation, if it lands, will be gated behind explicit operator approval flows.

Known weaknesses#

High-cardinality label churn#

Problem: a high-cardinality label in the selected grouping identity (for example pod=web-68f9c-xk2pq) creates one Incident per changing value rather than grouping the fleet-wide event. This can come from Alertmanager's groupLabels or from an explicit correlator.group_labels override.

Workaround: group the Alertmanager route on stable dimensions, or set an explicit override containing stable labels such as service, namespace, or alertname. AlertINT warns when a configured override matches none of an alert's labels and falls back safely instead of creating an empty key.

Flapping alerts#

Problem: an alert that fires, resolves, and re-fires within the correlation window is treated as separate alerts and may produce a confusing evidence pack with both firing and resolved entries for the same fingerprint.

Workaround: increase correlator.window_seconds to outlast typical flap cycles, or set repeat_interval in Alertmanager to suppress re-fires.

LLM confidence calibration#

Problem: the confidence field in a finding is the model's self-reported confidence. It is not calibrated against historical outcomes — 0.9 does not mean 90% accuracy; it means the model expressed high certainty. Early in deployment, treat all findings as advisory regardless of confidence value.

Philosophy: confidence is a signal for operator attention prioritisation, not an automated gate. Human review before action is expected.

Single-alert incidents with min_alerts > 1#

Problem: if an alert fires alone and min_alerts is set above 1, the agent still creates an incident and marks it ready at the end of the window. The triage skill runs on a single-alert evidence pack and may produce a lower-quality analysis.

Workaround: set min_alerts: 1 to always triage, or accept that single-alert findings have less correlation context.

Deeper metric context is operator-driven#

Problem: automatic Prometheus enrichment adds a snapshot of metric values at incident time to the LLM prompt, but deeper investigation — trends, comparisons, custom PromQL — happens through the MCP tools. The connected agent or operator must still choose useful queries.

Workaround: start with simple service-level queries for CPU, memory, latency, and error rate around the incident window. Automatic query suggestions are on the roadmap.

Where it's heading#

The roadmap grows the same core rather than bolting on side products. Currently being explored:

• Pattern / slow-burn rollups (repeated alerts over hours or days)
• More skills beyond acute triage
• Cost metering and budget caps
• SSO/RBAC and team fleet management (the planned hosted control plane)
• Pull-based Alertmanager reconciliation on startup
• A web UI

Missing something you need? Open a feature request — real-world use cases shape what gets built next, and we'd love to hear yours.