Alerters

Sending alerts through specified channels.

This is an older version of the ZenML documentation. To check the latest version please visit https://docs.zenml.io

Alerters allow you to send messages to chat services (like Slack, Discord, Mattermost, etc.) from within your pipeline. This is useful for immediately getting notified when failures happen, for general monitoring/reporting, and also for building human-in-the-loop ML.

Before reading this chapter, make sure that you are familiar with the concept of stacks, stack components and their flavors.

Base Abstraction

The base abstraction for alerters is very simple, as it only defines two abstract methods that subclasses should implement:

• post() takes a string, posts it to the desired chat service, and returns True if the operation succeeded, else False.

• ask() does the same as post(), but after sending the message, it waits until someone approves or rejects the operation from within the chat service (e.g., by sending "approve" / "reject" to the bot as response). ask() then only returns True if the operation succeeded and was approved, else False.

Then base abstraction looks something like this:

class BaseAlerter(StackComponent, ABC):
    """Base class for all ZenML alerters."""

    def post(
        self, message: str, config: Optional[BaseAlerterStepConfig]
    ) -> bool:
        """Post a message to a chat service."""
        return True

    def ask(
        self, question: str, config: Optional[BaseAlerterStepConfig]
    ) -> bool:
        """Post a message to a chat service and wait for approval."""
        return True

This is a slimmed-down version of the base implementation. To see the full docstrings and imports, please check the source code on GitHub.

List of available alerters

Currently, the only available alerter integration is Slack. The Slack alerter can be used to post/ask in a specified Slack channel via a dedicated bot account of a Slack app linked to the channel.

	Flavor	Integration
SlackAlerter	slack	slack

If you would like to see the available flavors for alerters, you can use the command:

zenml alerter flavor list

Build your own custom alerter

Creating your own custom alerter can be done in three simple steps:

1. Create a class that inherits from the BaseAlerter.

2. Define the FLAVOR class variable in your class (e.g., FLAVOR="discord")

3. Implement the post() and ask() methods for your alerter.

Once you are done with the implementation, you can register it through the CLI as:

zenml alerter flavor register <THE-SOURCE-PATH-OF-YOUR-ALERTER>