Building an Alerting Pipeline from Scratch: Prometheus, Alertmanager, and the Alert That Actually Fired

Reading about monitoring is one thing. Getting an actual alert to land in your inbox at 2am — well, in my case, on demand, during a test — is another. I wanted to understand observability the way an SRE actually experiences it: not as a diagram in a slide deck, but as a pipeline you build, break, and fix yourself. So I set out to build a minimal...