Default e-mail template and Description field of alert templates is misleading and too busy
Description
How to test
Setup PMM alerting with any of the provided templates.
Verify that the alert labels are not dumped in the 'Description' field.
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AFFECTED CS IDs
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Tibor Korocz (Percona) December 16, 2024 at 2:35 PM
Hi , today in a call Iwo told me customers are complaining about the notification templates. He showed this ticket to me and it is marked it Done
, I think there is some confusion here , he was talking about the $value
, but in the PRs to this ticket they only changed the description for three alerts and removed the labels
, which is also important but if I am correct that is not what this ticket was created for. I just tested it and $value
, still added to emails:
Is there any reason why we want the value
there in that format?

Michael Okoko May 17, 2023 at 12:35 PM
Btw we are currently making some improvements here and wondering what info will be considered less "noise" in both the email subject and message i..e, what to include, what to drop, etc.

Roma Novikov March 21, 2023 at 1:28 PM
Sorry, lost this in emails.
Yes, I see this more as an Improvement to make Alert templates better. Will convert the issue and schedule.

Holman Romero March 16, 2023 at 10:59 AM
Looks to me more like an enhancement/improvement than a bug. Please have a look and share your thoughts. Thank you!
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PMM uses
$value
variable in Description field of alert templates. That causes to include the whole alert repsonse object, instead of just the value. It makes the alerting too verbose and hard to read.I've included screenshots and a sample e-mail that Grafana generated.
It affects every built-in alert template (for testing,
PostgreSQL too many connections
template was used). Moreover, default e-mail templates are very busy and considered too verbose.https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/alerting/manage-notifications/template-notifications/create-notification-templates/