Send Text Alerts Directly from Prometheus

No. Alertmanager ships with email, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, Slack, Pushover, VictorOps, WeChat, and webhook receivers. SMS is missing. GitHub issues prometheus/alertmanager#2559 (SNS receiver proposal) and #3573 (native incident management) document the gap. To send SMS from Alertmanager, you either point the email receiver at a third-party email-to-SMS gateway (TextBolt), run a sidecar service like Sachet or Promtotwilio behind a webhook receiver, or pay for an IRM platform like PagerDuty.

After AT&T retired txt.att.net in June 2025, T-Mobile took tmomail.net offline in December 2024, and Verizon’s vtext.com shutdown completes by March 2027, Prometheus shops have three options: replace the carrier gateway address with TextBolt’s gateway in the existing email_configs entry (closest one-line replacement), deploy a Sachet or Promtotwilio sidecar behind a webhook receiver, or switch to a paid IRM platform. TextBolt preserves the Alertmanager mental model: email_configs receiver, routing tree, templates all unchanged.

Sign up for TextBolt, complete 10DLC business verification, and add an email_configs entry to your Alertmanager receiver with to: +1[phone]@sendemailtotext.com. Reference the receiver from a route matcher in alertmanager.yml. Reload config. Every matching alert becomes an SMS in seconds. No sidecar deployment, no Sachet pod, no webhook contract, no Twilio account.

Yes. The integration uses the standard Alertmanager email receiver. Replace the dead carrier gateway value ([phone]@vtext.com) in email_configs.to with +1[phone]@sendemailtotext.com. Existing SMTP settings, routing tree, group_by, group_interval, and template overrides all carry over.

Yes. The TextBolt SMS body is whatever the Alertmanager email body is. Use existing tmpl_text templates, label substitutions, and routing-tree formatting. The webhook plus Sachet path forces re-implementing formatting in the sidecar’s template language; the email_configs path keeps everything you already wrote.

Yes. TextBolt registers your sender identity with The Campaign Registry during onboarding so SMS routes through carrier-approved 10DLC infrastructure. This satisfies FCC business SMS requirements and produces the audit trail federal-contractor and regulated cloud-engineering teams need. TextBolt is not HIPAA compliant; healthcare-adjacent monitoring with PHI requirements should contact sales.

Yes. Replies to a TextBolt-sent SMS land as an email in the inbox of the alert sender. The whole rotation sees acknowledgments. Note: TextBolt replies do not automatically create an Alertmanager silence (Alertmanager’s silence API requires a UI-initiated or API-driven action). For full SMS-to-silence automation, route replies through your existing on-call tooling.

Yes. The email_configs receiver is consistent across vanilla Prometheus, Prometheus Operator, kube-prometheus-stack, and Bitnami/community Helm charts. Add the email_configs entry under alertmanager.config.receivers in your Helm values.yaml, or via an AlertmanagerConfig CRD with the Operator. Same TextBolt gateway address slots into all of them.

Basic $29/month (500 credits, single user), Standard $49/month (1,000 credits, up to 10 team members), Professional $99/month (2,500 credits, up to 10 team members), Enterprise custom (5,000+ credits). $45/year setup fee. Annual plans 20% off. Compares favorably to Twilio per-message billing at K8s alert-storm scale.

About 30 minutes of hands-on configuration: account creation, toll-free number selection, and editing alertmanager.yml and reloading. 10DLC business verification with The Campaign Registry typically takes 1 to 2 business days for carrier approval, which TextBolt handles for you in parallel. Once your number is approved, trigger a test alert and the first SMS lands in seconds.