Elastalert constant realerting. - elasticsearch

Question

I'm having some difficulties setting up an elastalert rule. It's quite a basic one, and I've read the documentation but clearly not understood it and I'm after some help.
I have a basic test rule that i want to alert when my data input to elastic from certain devices stops for more that 5 minutes.
es_host: localhost
es_port: 9200
name: Example rule
type: flatline
index: test_mapping-*
threshold: 1
timeframe:
minutes: 5
filter:
- term:
device: "ggYthy767b"
alert:
- command
command: ["/bin/test"]
realert:
minutes: 10
This works, so when data stops i get an alert, then that alert is silenced until 10 minutes later it realerts again. The issue is that it realerts every 10 minutes and i don't know how to stop it. Is there a way to get it to realert just once and then stop? Or have i misunderstood? Also I have 10+ different devices, and i want the same alert to apply if any of them stop sending data for 5 minutes, is that possible within one rule? Thanks very much in advance.

Answer 1

The question you need to ask to yourself is how often do you want to get alerted. Once a lifetime, a year, a month or fortnightly or what? So "realert" is the part you want to edit. You might want to change it to something like below. So even if the alert is triggered multiple times you'll only get it once a day. It uses simple English terms so you can update it how you like it (weeks, hours etc.).
realert:
days: 1
But if you're getting alerted much more than you want, either you're system is too unstable or your alerts are too paranoid. For example for this alert every 5 minutes you're looking for one record which actually doesn't get populated. You should raise your period or add less selective filters because it's a 'flatline' alert. You can also use it with "query_key" so it will be applied on a per key basis.