GoAlert - Self-Hosted On-Call Alerting & Escalation

This is a repackaged open source software product wherein additional charges apply for cloudimg support services.

## Overview

GoAlert is an open source on-call scheduling, escalation and alerting platform maintained by Target. It routes incidents to the right responder through on-call schedules, rotations and escalation policies, so the right person is paged at the right time. This AMI delivers GoAlert fully installed and secured, backed by a local PostgreSQL database, and exposed through a browser-based web interface you run and control in your own AWS account.

## Why This AMI Over SaaS Alternatives

Unlike per-user SaaS on-call tools such as PagerDuty or Opsgenie, this AMI gives you full data residency inside your AWS account with no per-user fees, no vendor lock-in, and no external data transfer. Unlike a manual install that requires binary verification, PostgreSQL provisioning, database migration, systemd unit authoring, reverse-proxy configuration, and credential hardening, this image completes every step at build time. Launch an instance and reach a working, authenticated on-call platform without editing a single configuration file.

## Application Stack

GoAlert is a single self-contained Go binary installed from the official upstream release (sha256 pinned), running as an unprivileged system user under a hardened systemd unit. It is bound to the loopback interface only and fronted by an nginx reverse proxy on port 80. A local PostgreSQL server holds all scheduling and alerting data on a dedicated data volume, independently resizable and separate from the OS disk. systemd starts PostgreSQL, GoAlert and nginx on boot and restarts them on failure.

## Security Hardening

This image follows a defence-in-depth approach:

• No default or shared credentials: a cryptographically random administrator password is generated on each instance's first boot and written only to a root-only file
• Per-instance secrets: the PostgreSQL role password and the GoAlert data-encryption key are unique to each instance, never baked into the image
• Network isolation: the application and the database bind exclusively to the loopback interface; only the nginx reverse proxy is exposed
• Least privilege: the application runs as an unprivileged system user with NoNewPrivileges set
• Dedicated data volume: the on-call database lives on its own disk, surviving OS-disk changes and resizable independently
• Automatic restart: systemd monitors all services and restarts them on failure

Buyers requiring formal compliance documentation should contact cloudimg to discuss specific requirements.

## Concrete Use Cases

• Engineering on-call rotations: Platform teams running follow-the-sun rotations for production services, with escalation policies that page the next responder automatically when an alert is not acknowledged
• Self-hosted PagerDuty alternative: Organisations that want incident paging kept entirely inside their own AWS account for data-residency or cost reasons
• NOC and infrastructure alerting: Operations centres wiring monitoring systems into GoAlert via its generic and webhook integrations so infrastructure alerts reach the on-call engineer through their configured notification provider

## AWS Integration

Deploy on any EC2 instance type. Use the unauthenticated health endpoint with an Application Load Balancer for availability monitoring. Back up scheduling and alerting data using EBS snapshots or AWS Backup of the dedicated database volume. Resize the database volume independently as your alert history grows. To deliver alerts by SMS and voice, add your own Twilio account in the GoAlert admin console; email, Slack and webhook notifications are also configured post-launch.

## Getting Started

Read your unique credential from the root-only file, open the web interface in your browser, sign in as the administrator, and create your first on-call schedule, rotation and escalation policy. Configure a notification provider (Twilio for SMS and voice, or SMTP, Slack and webhooks) in the admin console to start delivering alerts.

## Evaluate at Minimal Cost

Launch on a small instance type for a short period to evaluate the full platform in your own environment before committing to production use.

## cloudimg Support

24/7 technical support by email and chat. Help with deployment, reverse-proxy termination with your own domain and certificate, configuring notification providers, integrating monitoring systems, and backup planning for your on-call database.