alertreplay

A CLI that replays alerting rules over historical Prometheus/VictoriaMetrics data.

When stdout is a TTY, results are displayed in an interactive table that lets you press Enter to open the dashboard URL for any alert row. When piped or redirected, output is rendered as markdown.

Installation

go install github.com/steved/alertreplay/cmd/alertreplay@latest

Usage

Replay

Replay an alert rule against historical data:

alertreplay \
  --prometheus-url http://localhost:9090 \
  --from '2025-12-01 00:00:00' \
  --to '2025-12-15 00:00:00' \
  /path/to/alerts.yaml \
  MyAlertName

Discover values for a label and replay each in parallel:

alertreplay \
  --prometheus-url http://localhost:9090 \
  --from '30 days ago' \
  --by cluster \
  /path/to/alerts.yaml \
  MyAlertName

With a dashboard URL so each alert row links to Prometheus:

alertreplay \
  --prometheus-url http://localhost:9090 \
  --from '7 days ago' \
  --ui-type prometheus \
  --ui-url http://localhost:9090/graph \
  /path/to/alerts.yaml \
  MyAlertName

Diff

Compare the same alert across two rule files:

alertreplay diff \
  --prometheus-url http://localhost:9090 \
  --from '2025-12-01 00:00:00' \
  --ignore-labels instance \
  /path/to/alerts_old.yaml \
  /path/to/alerts_new.yaml \
  MyAlertName

Global flags

Flag	Description	Default
--prometheus-url	Prometheus or VMSelect API URL.
--from	Start time: YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS (UTC) or relative like 30 days ago.	required
--to	End time: same format as --from.	now
--interval	Step size between evaluations.	30s
--parallelism	Number of parallel Prometheus queries.	10
--filters	Append label filters to alert expressions (e.g. --filters cluster=us-east).
--by	Discover filter values via query and run the alert once per value. Mutually exclusive with --filters.
--ui-url	Base URL for the dashboard UI (e.g. http://localhost:9090/graph).
--ui-type	Dashboard UI type: prometheus, vmui, or grafana.	prometheus
-v	Enable debug logging.

Dashboard UI types

The --ui-url and --ui-type flags control the clickable URL generated for each alert.

• prometheus -- Standard Prometheus graph UI. Pass the base graph URL (e.g. http://localhost:9090/graph).
• vmui -- VictoriaMetrics UI. Pass the vmui URL (e.g. http://victoriametrics:8428/vmui). Existing query params like ?tenant=0 are preserved.
• grafana -- Grafana Explore. Pass the full explore URL including datasource params (e.g. http://grafana:3000/explore?orgId=1&ds=production).

Diff flags

Flag	Description
--ignore-labels	Labels to ignore when matching alerts between files. Can be repeated.

Development

Prerequisites

• Go 1.26+
• mise (optional, for task runner)

Building

go build ./cmd/alertreplay

Running tests

go test ./...

Or with mise (integration tests require Docker):

mise run test

Linting and formatting

mise run lint
mise run fmt

Contributing

1. Fork the repository.
2. Create a feature branch from main.
3. Make your changes and add tests.
4. Ensure go test ./... and mise run lint pass.
5. Open a pull request.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.