number variables from alert are typed string and cannot be used in templates with lt/gt/eq ?

[Dieterbe]

IIRC I spoke about this with Matt Jibson years ago, and although I couldn't find the ticket, I think it has always been an unresolved issue

basically when you have something like this in your template {{else if lt $v.Value $.Alert.Vars.b }} you're bound to get error calling lt: incompatible types for comparison
no matter whether you define $b as 60 or 60.0, v.Value is a number obtained from streak(), printf says the type is expr.Number, whereas $b has type string.

notably if you replace $.Alert.Vars.b with 60.0 it works fine

[kylebrandt]

I think you need to wrap $b in Eval:

template test {
    subject = {{.Last.Status}}: {{.Alert.Name}} on {{.Group.host}}
    body = `{{ lt (.Eval .Alert.Vars.q) (.Eval .Alert.Vars.threshold) }}`
}

alert test {
    template = test
    $q = avg(q("avg:rate:os.cpu{host=*bosun*}", "5m", ""))
    $threshold = 1
    crit = avg(q("avg:rate:os.cpu{host=*bosun*}", "5m", "")) > $threshold
}

[Dieterbe]

you're right! that makes it work, and it doesn't even matter if declared as 60 or 60.0
both work.