Production-Ready Redis Monitoring with Prometheus Alert Templates
Redis is a critical component in modern infrastructure, serving as a high-performance in-memory data store and cache. Ensuring its health and availability is essential for application performance and reliability. This blog explores how to monitor Redis effectively using Prometheus and a set of pre-built community alert rules from the DrDroidLab/prometheus-alert-templates GitHub repository. These alerts cover critical failure modes, performance degradation, and resource exhaustion, enabling site reliability engineers (SREs), DevOps teams, and infrastructure managers to detect and resolve issues proactively.
Fires when the Redis exporter reports that the Redis instance is down or unreachable. This could indicate a crash, connectivity issue, or configuration error.
Tuning tips
Increase the evaluation interval or add for-duration (e.g., for: 2m) to avoid noise during brief restarts or exporter hiccups.
Fires when a Redis instance switches roles unexpectedly (e.g., master to replica), which may indicate failover events or misconfigurations.
Tuning tips
Use this in HA deployments only. Add `for: 5m` to reduce flapping alerts during legitimate failovers.
Service availability check
Why this matters
Clone the alert templates repository from GitHub: git clone https://github.com/DrDroidLab/prometheus-alert-templates.git
Tuning tips
Copy the redis alert file (redis.rules) into your Prometheus configuration folder.
Service availability check
Why this matters
Tuning tips
Service availability check
Why this matters
Tuning tips
Quick Setup
1
Include the alert rule file in your Prometheus configuration under 'rule_files': e.g., rule_files: ["redis.rules"]
2
Reload Prometheus to apply the new alert rules: `kill -HUP $(pidof prometheus)` or restart the service
3
Ensure Alertmanager is configured to receive alerts and route accordingly.
4
How do I ensure these alerts work with custom Redis exporters?
5
These alerts assume standard Redis exporter metrics. If you're using a fork or customized exporter, validate metric names.
Frequently Asked Questions
What namespace or job label does this template assume?
These templates are generic and do not hard-code job labels. Modify selectors to match your deployment labels.
Can these alerts be used in Kubernetes?
Yes, as long as Redis exporter is scraping metrics and Prometheus is configured to discover those pods or services.
What Prometheus version is required?
These rules use basic PromQL features compatible with Prometheus 2.x onward.
Ready to Get Started?
Start monitoring your Redis instances more reliably today by integrating the Redis alert rules from the DrDroidLab prometheus-alert-templates GitHub repo. These pre-defined alerts provide a production-ready foundation for observability teams focused on Redis health and availability.