GoAlert on Google Cloud Run

GoAlert is an open-source, Apache 2.0-licensed on-call scheduling and incident alert-escalation platform, originally built by Target and run in production at scale. It lets teams define escalation policies, on-call rotations and schedules, and dispatch outbound notifications by email, webhook, or (optionally) Twilio SMS/voice. This module deploys GoAlert on Cloud Run v2 on top of the App_CloudRun foundation, which provisions and manages the shared Google Cloud infrastructure.

This guide focuses on the cloud services GoAlert uses and how to explore and operate them from the Google Cloud Console and the command line. For the mechanics common to every Cloud Run application — service identity, ingress and load balancing, scaling and concurrency, CI/CD, Cloud Armor, IAP, Binary Authorization, VPC Service Controls, backups, and the deployment lifecycle — refer to the App_CloudRun foundation guide rather than repeating them here.

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What GoAlert costs on RAD, and how that compares

Running GoAlert in your own Google Cloud project costs about US$101.74/month in Google Cloud charges, on top of a one-time 110-credit RAD module fee (99 credits — 10% lower — in a RAD-managed project). GoAlert is an open-source on-call scheduling and alert escalation platform, built by Target and running in production at scale. If you deploy into a RAD-managed project, you can pause the whole thing for free and pick it back up later — see "Pause it for free" below.

GoAlert is also available on GKE — see the GKE guide if you need Kubernetes-based orchestration; this guide covers the lower-cost Cloud Run option.

What you pay on RAD

	Own project	RAD-managed project
Module fee	110 credits (one-time)	99 credits (one-time, 10% lower)
Build time	~3–6 credits (one-time, per build)	~3–6 credits (one-time, per build)
Google Cloud running cost	~US$101.74/month, billed to your own Google billing account at list price	~48 credits/day (~US$4.80/day), metered hourly at list price plus RAD's margin

Default running cost in your own project

Resource	US$/month (Google list price, us-central1)
Cloud Run, 1x vCPU / 0.5 GiB (alwaysOn)	US$44.72
Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL, 1 vCPU / 3.75 GB, zonal, 10 GB SSD	US$51.02
Cloud NAT and networking	US$5
Cloud Storage (add-ons, backups)	US$1
Total	US$101.74

How it compares

• There is no officially hosted/cloud version of GoAlert to compare against, so the honest comparison is against self-managed infrastructure, not a competing SaaS.
• A bare VPS sized to roughly 1 vCPU / 0.5 GiB — a Hetzner CPX22 (2 vCPU/4GB, ~US$24/mo), a DigitalOcean 2 vCPU/4GB Droplet (US$24/mo), or GCP's own Compute Engine e2-standard-2 (2 vCPU/8GB, ~US$49/mo) — usually undercuts RAD's sticker price; a VPS a size or two smaller would undercut it further.
• What that lower price does not include is the admin's own time: patching the OS, rotating database backups, renewing TLS certificates and watching for downtime. RAD's managed Cloud SQL, Secret Manager and monitoring do that for you, which is the actual trade being made, not the sticker price.
• RAD is not claiming to be cheaper than a bare VPS in cash terms — it usually is not. The case for RAD is what's managed for you.

Pause it for free: delete a RAD-managed project, restore it when you need it

If GoAlert is running in a RAD-managed project, you can stop paying for it entirely without destroying it. Deleting that project first unlinks its billing, then asks Google to delete the project outright — Google's own 30-day recoverable soft delete. Unlike deleting the GoAlert module on its own, this does not tear down Cloud SQL, any VM or the compute resource one by one: the whole project simply stops, and nothing is charged while it waits, because billing is already unlinked.

Restoring, within 30 days and only by the project's owner, asks Google to undelete the project and reattaches its billing account, then asks you to run Update on each deployment to confirm everything came back. Because nothing was individually destroyed, that Update finds the same resources already there — it is a check, not a rebuild, and an Update never charges the module fee again. This costs only a handful of build-time credits in total — roughly 5–10 credits, under US$1, for a typical 2–3-deployment chain. The 99-credit module fee is not charged again.

What this needs: you must own the project (not one RAD only manages billing for), you must restore it yourself within 30 days — after that Google deletes it for good — and restoring is admitted like creating a new project, so your purchased credit balance must still clear the tier's floor (100 credits for the sandbox tier most study/demo use fits). Google says most services are fully working again within 36 hours of a restore.

One real gap: nightly backups are written to a bucket inside the project, and that bucket has Cloud Storage's soft-delete explicitly turned off, so it is very likely gone as soon as you delete the project — even though the project itself is recoverable for 30 days. If you have customised GoAlert and want to keep that work, copy a backup out (to Google Drive, or a bucket outside the project) before deleting. For a default install with nothing irreplaceable in it, this does not matter.

Pay only while you use it, the other way: delete and redeploy

If GoAlert is in your own project (or more than 30 days have passed on a RAD-managed one), the way to stop paying is to delete the deployment and redeploy later when you need it again.

A redeploy costs the module fee again, plus the builds: roughly 110 + ~3–6 credits (~US$11.45) in your own project, or 99 + ~3–6 credits on a RAD-managed one.

Deleting only saves money once GoAlert would otherwise sit unused long enough to clear that redeploy cost against its own running cost: roughly about 4 days or more idle in your own project (against its ~US$101.74/month Google Cloud bill), or about 3 days or more idle in a RAD-managed project (against its ~48 credits/day).

Most of GoAlert's running cost is the database and the shared file/cache VM. They stop only when nothing else in the project uses them, so deleting this app while something else shares the project saves only this app's own compute share of the total above.

Keep data first: nightly backups go to a bucket inside the deployment and are deleted with it, so copy the latest backup out before deleting if you want to keep it.

Lab sessions and Managed Environments

• Lab sessions, for training: a trainer runs a session for a class. Each participant gets the app in their own Google Cloud project for 15 minutes to 24 hours, within an allowance the trainer sets. Either the trainer funds every place, or each participant pays for their own. Everything is deleted when the session ends and unused credits go back to the trainer.
• Managed Environments, for consultancies: a partner runs the app for a client from a ring-fenced wallet it funds, and settles with the client directly. If the wallet runs low, billing pauses and the data is kept, so nobody receives an unexpected charge. At the end the partner hands the project over and the deployments become the client's own.
• Credits can be bought in more than 20 currencies, including XAF, XOF, NGN, GHS, KES and ZAR, by card, bank transfer or mobile money.

Sources (8 October 2026): Google Cloud Billing Catalog API list prices; radmodules.dev/pricing for RAD's own fees and daily-credit estimates; Google's project delete/restore docs for the pause/restore mechanics.

1. Overview

GoAlert runs as a single Go binary on Cloud Run v2. The deployment wires together a focused set of Google Cloud services:

Capability	Google Cloud service	Notes
Compute	Cloud Run v2	Go binary, 1 vCPU / 512 MiB by default, cpu_always_allocated = true, min_instance_count = 1 — no scale-to-zero
Database	Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL (POSTGRES_17)	Required — GoAlert does not support MySQL or other engines; pgcrypto extension installed automatically
Secrets	Secret Manager	Auto-generated admin password and a data-encryption key; database password managed by the foundation
Ingress	Cloud Run URL / Cloud Load Balancing	Default run.app URL; optional external HTTPS load balancer + custom domain

There is no object storage row in this table — GoAlert_Common's storage_buckets output is always []. GoAlert has no file-upload/attachment feature; every piece of application state (escalation policies, schedules, alerts, notification history, users) lives in PostgreSQL.

Sensible defaults worth knowing up front:

• PostgreSQL is mandatory. database_type = "POSTGRES_17" is fixed by GoAlert_Common; selecting any other engine breaks startup.
• Always-on CPU, no scale-to-zero. cpu_always_allocated = true and min_instance_count = 1 are the defaults because GoAlert runs a continuous in-process "engine" loop that evaluates escalation-policy timing, rotation state, and outbound notification dispatch. Under request-based billing or at zero instances, that loop simply doesn't run — an alert created via API/webhook could silently never escalate.
• max_instance_count stays at 1. GoAlert officially supports multiple concurrent engine instances (not a double-fire bug per upstream docs), but recommends running one default-mode instance plus additional --api-only replicas to avoid contention — a two-tier topology this module does not wire.
• No Redis, no object storage. GoAlert's state lives entirely in PostgreSQL; it needs no external cache, queue, or file storage.
• GOALERT_DB_URL is assembled at container start, not at plan time. GoAlert accepts only a single Postgres connection-string env var, and the runtime Secret-Manager-sourced DB_PASSWORD can't be URL-encoded until the container actually starts — entrypoint.sh (and each init-job script) builds it from the discrete DB_* values the Foundation injects.
• public_url auto-computes a run.app URL when left empty. GoAlert_CloudRun passes public_url = var.public_url != "" ? var.public_url : "https://${service_name}-${project_number}.${region}.run.app" into GoAlert_Common, so GOALERT_PUBLIC_URL (used for OIDC/CSRF-referer validation and links in outgoing notifications) is correct out of the box. Use the service_url output: reaching the service by Cloud Run's other hostname (the hash form shown in the Cloud Run console) fails the first login's CSRF-referer check — a browser is redirected to the canonical URL, but an API client hardcoded to the console URL breaks.

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2. Google Cloud Services & How to Explore Them

All commands assume PROJECT and REGION are set. Service and resource names are reported in the deployment Outputs.

A. Cloud Run — the GoAlert service

GoAlert runs as a Cloud Run v2 service, always-on (min instances 1, CPU always allocated) rather than autoscaled to zero, so its escalation-engine loop keeps running continuously.

• Console: Cloud Run → select the service for revisions, traffic, logs, and metrics.
• CLI:

  gcloud run services list --project "$PROJECT" --region "$REGION"
  gcloud run services describe <service-name> --project "$PROJECT" --region "$REGION"
  gcloud run revisions list --service <service-name> --project "$PROJECT" --region "$REGION"

See App_CloudRun for scaling, concurrency, execution environment, and traffic splitting.

B. Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL

GoAlert stores all application data — escalation policies, schedules, rotations, alerts, notification history, and users — in a managed Cloud SQL PostgreSQL instance. The service connects privately through the Cloud SQL Auth Proxy over a Unix socket; no public IP is exposed. entrypoint.sh detects the socket and symlinks it to /tmp/.s.PGSQL.5432 before assembling GOALERT_DB_URL.

• Console: SQL → select the instance for connections, backups, flags, metrics.
• CLI:

  gcloud sql instances list --project "$PROJECT"
  gcloud sql instances describe <instance-name> --project "$PROJECT"
  gcloud sql connect <instance-name> --user=<db-user> --database=<db-name> --project "$PROJECT"

The instance name, database, user, and password secret are in the Outputs. See App_CloudRun for the connection model, backups, and password rotation.

C. Secret Manager

Two secrets are generated automatically by GoAlert_Common and stored in Secret Manager: the admin password (consumed by the admin-bootstrap init job) and a data-encryption key (recommended by upstream GoAlert docs for encrypting stored API keys/sensitive config at rest, though not code-enforced at boot). The database password is managed separately by the foundation.

• Console: Security → Secret Manager.
• CLI:

  gcloud secrets list --project "$PROJECT" --filter="name~goalert"
  gcloud secrets versions access latest --secret=<admin-password-secret-id> --project "$PROJECT"

D. Networking & ingress

The service is reachable at its run.app URL by default. An external HTTPS load balancer with a custom domain, Cloud CDN, and Cloud Armor can be layered on; ingress settings and VPC egress control connectivity.

• Console: Cloud Run (service URL); Network services → Load balancing.
• CLI:

  gcloud run services describe <service-name> --region "$REGION" --format='value(status.url)'

See App_CloudRun.

E. Cloud Logging & Monitoring

Container logs flow to Cloud Logging; Cloud Run and Cloud SQL metrics flow to Cloud Monitoring, with optional uptime checks and alert policies.

• Console: Logging → Logs Explorer; Monitoring → Dashboards / Alerting.
• CLI:

  gcloud run services logs read <service-name> --project "$PROJECT" --region "$REGION" --limit 50

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3. GoAlert Application Behaviour

• The 3-stage initialization job chain is load-bearing. GoAlert_Common defines three ordered Cloud Run Jobs, each depending on the one before it, all with execute_on_apply = true:

  1. db-init (postgres:15-alpine) — creates the PostgreSQL role and database.
  2. db-migrate (goalert/goalert:<version>, depends_on_jobs = ["db-init"]) — runs goalert migrate --db-url=..., applying GoAlert's own schema. This must run before admin-bootstrap: goalert add-user has no migration logic of its own, and on a fresh database it fails with relation "auth_basic_users" does not exist.
  3. admin-bootstrap (goalert/goalert:<version>, depends_on_jobs = ["db-migrate"]) — runs goalert add-user --admin directly against Postgres to create the first admin login. Safe to run at apply time (unlike an HTTP-based bootstrap) because it talks straight to the database, not the running server.

  All three scripts retry internally (up to 10 attempts, 5s apart) to absorb Cloud SQL/Cloud Run Job scheduling latency, and the Cloud Run Jobs themselves retry up to 3 times on failure.

• No first-visit setup wizard. GoAlert has no web-based initial-admin flow — the admin-bootstrap job is the only way an admin account gets created. Retrieve the generated password:

  gcloud secrets versions access latest --secret=<admin_password_secret_id output>

• Health endpoint. /health is GoAlert's documented public, unauthenticated endpoint (200 once the app lifecycle leaves the "Starting" state). This module's startup and liveness probes default to a TCP port check rather than an HTTP path check — a conservative default matching this catalog's established pattern — and both proved correct on live verification (HTTP 200 on /health with real "listening and serving HTTP" log lines).

• Inspect job execution:

  gcloud run jobs list --project "$PROJECT" --region "$REGION"
  gcloud run jobs executions list --job <job-name> --project "$PROJECT" --region "$REGION"

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4. Configuration Variables

Variables are grouped exactly as they appear on the deployment platform. Only settings specific to or notable for GoAlert are listed; every other input is inherited from App_CloudRun with its standard behaviour.

Group 1 — Project & Identity

Variable	Default	Description
project_id	(required)	Target Google Cloud project.
region	us-central1	Region for the service and regional resources.

Group 2 — Deployment Environment

Variable	Default	Description
tenant_id	demo	Short suffix that makes resource names unique per environment. Use a distinct value (e.g. cr) from any co-deployed GoAlert_GKE (gke) to avoid a naming collision.
support_users	[]	Emails granted project access and monitoring alerts.
resource_labels	{}	Labels applied to all resources.

Group 3 — Application Identity

Variable	Default	Description
application_name	goalert	Base name for resources. Do not change after first deploy.
display_name	GoAlert	Human-readable name shown in the Console.
description	(set)	Service description.
application_version	latest	Image tag. "latest" maps to a pinned Dockerfile build arg (GOALERT_VERSION = v0.34.1), matching upstream's own recommendation against bare latest/nightly in production.
admin_username	admin	Username created by the admin-bootstrap init job. Genuinely forwarded through goalert.tf into GoAlert_Common.
admin_email	admin@techequity.cloud	Email for the initial admin account.
public_url	""	Left empty, auto-computes https://<service>-<project-number>.<region>.run.app. Used for OIDC/CSRF-referer validation and outgoing-notification links.

Group 4 — Runtime & Scaling

Variable	Default	Description
deploy_application	true	Set false to provision infrastructure only.
cpu_limit	1000m	1 vCPU is sufficient for GoAlert's Go binary.
memory_limit	512Mi	Gen2 hard floor, independent of cpu_always_allocated.
cpu_always_allocated	true	Keeps CPU allocated for the whole life of a RUNNING instance — required for the escalation engine's continuous loop.
min_instance_count	1	Not scale-to-zero — at zero instances the escalation engine doesn't run at all.
max_instance_count	1	Single default-mode engine instance; multi-instance needs a --api-only topology this module doesn't wire.
container_port	8081	GoAlert's native HTTP port (GOALERT_LISTEN).
execution_environment	gen2	Required execution environment.
timeout_seconds	300	Maximum request duration.
enable_cloudsql_volume	true	Cloud SQL Auth Proxy Unix-socket sidecar.
cloudsql_volume_mount_path	/cloudsql	Container path for the Auth Proxy socket.
container_protocol	http1	"http1" or "h2c".
enable_image_mirroring	true	Mirrors the GoAlert base image into Artifact Registry.

Group 5 — Access & Networking

Variable	Default	Description
ingress_settings	all	Traffic ingress control.
vpc_egress_setting	PRIVATE_RANGES_ONLY	VPC egress control.
enable_iap	false	Identity-Aware Proxy.

Group 6 — Environment Variables & Secrets

Variable	Default	Description
environment_variables	{}	Extra non-secret settings. GOALERT_LISTEN and GOALERT_PUBLIC_URL are set automatically.
secret_environment_variables	{}	Map of env var → Secret Manager secret name.

Group 12 — Database Backend

Variable	Default	Description
database_type	POSTGRES_17	Cloud SQL engine. GoAlert requires PostgreSQL.
db_name	goalert	PostgreSQL database name.
db_user	goalert	PostgreSQL application user.
db_password_env_var_name	""	Leftover copy-paste default from a prior template. Additive per Foundation semantics — injects an unused extra secret env var alongside the standard DB_PASSWORD that GoAlert's entrypoint actually reads. Harmless; clear to "" if it bothers you.
database_password_length	32	Generated password length (16–64).

Group 13 — Jobs & Scheduled Tasks

Variable	Default	Description
initialization_jobs	[]	Leave empty for GoAlert_Common's default 3-job chain (db-init → db-migrate → admin-bootstrap). A non-empty list replaces it entirely — you take over ordering and content.
cron_jobs	[]	GoAlert has no platform-scheduled recurring tasks by default.

Group 14 — Observability & Health

Variable	Default	Description
startup_probe	TCP, 30s delay, 30 retries	Accommodates first-boot migration latency (db-migrate).
liveness_probe	disabled	Cloud Run restarts the container on process exit; the startup probe gates readiness.
uptime_check_config	{ enabled=false, path="/health" }	Cloud Monitoring uptime check.

Group 21 — Redis

Variable	Default	Description
enable_redis	false	Not required by GoAlert; present for platform compatibility.

Group 22 — VPC Service Controls & Audit Logging

Standard App_CloudRun VPC-SC integration — see App_CloudRun.

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5. Outputs

Returned on a successful deployment — the quickest way to locate and explore the running resources.

Output	Description
service_name	Cloud Run service name.
service_url	Default run.app URL of the service.
service_location	Region the service runs in.
database_instance_name	Cloud SQL instance name.
database_name / database_user	Application database name / user.
database_password_secret	Secret Manager secret holding the DB password.
database_host / database_port	DB endpoint / port.
storage_buckets	Always [] — GoAlert provisions no storage buckets.
container_image	Deployed image.
initialization_jobs	Names of the created init jobs (db-init, db-migrate, admin-bootstrap).
deployment_id / tenant_id / resource_prefix	Naming identifiers.
project_id / project_number	Project identifiers.
cicd_enabled / github_repository_url	CI/CD status.
vpc_sc_enabled / vpc_sc_perimeter_name / vpc_sc_dry_run_mode	VPC-SC status.

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6. Configuration Pitfalls & Sensible Defaults

Risk: Critical (data loss / outage / security) — High (service degraded) — Medium (cost or partial degradation) — Low (minor).

Inherited plan-time validation. This module passes its configuration through the App_CloudRun foundation engine, which validates values and combinations at plan time. Invalid configuration fails the plan with a clear, named error before any resource is created.

Setting	Sensible value	Risk	Consequence if wrong
database_type	POSTGRES_17	Critical	Any other engine breaks GoAlert's schema and startup entirely — pgcrypto and the whole goalert migrate flow are Postgres-specific.
initialization_jobs order (db-init → db-migrate → admin-bootstrap)	Leave [] unless you fully understand the dependency chain	Critical	Running admin-bootstrap before db-migrate fails with relation "auth_basic_users" does not exist on a fresh database — goalert add-user has no migration logic of its own.
min_instance_count / cpu_always_allocated	1 / true	High	GoAlert's escalation-timing engine is a continuous in-process loop — at zero instances, or under CPU-throttled request-based billing, escalations for real alerts can be silently delayed or missed entirely.
public_url	Leave "" (auto-computed) or set the real external URL	High	An incorrect GOALERT_PUBLIC_URL breaks OIDC auth callbacks and every link in outgoing notification emails (falls back to GoAlert's own http://localhost:8081 if genuinely unset downstream).
admin_username / admin_email	Set once, retrieve password from Secret Manager	Medium	GoAlert has no self-service password reset flow visible from Terraform; losing track of the bootstrapped admin credential means using the goalert CLI directly against the database to create a new one.
max_instance_count	1 unless you wire a --api-only topology	Medium	GoAlert supports multiple engine instances safely (not a double-fire bug per upstream docs), but this module has no built-in mechanism to designate --api-only replicas, so scaling past 1 without that extra wiring just runs multiple full engine instances.
db_password_env_var_name	Leave as-is or clear to ""	Low	The default LISTMONK_db__password is inert leftover cruft from another module's template — harmless, but confusing if you go looking for it in GoAlert's actual config.

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For the foundation behaviour referenced throughout — service identity, scaling and concurrency, ingress and load balancing, CI/CD, Cloud Armor, IAP, Binary Authorization, VPC-SC, backups, and image mirroring — see App_CloudRun. GoAlert-specific application configuration shared with the GKE variant is described in GoAlert_Common.

Related guides

• Hands-on lab: GoAlert on Cloud Run — deploy it step by step, with the console screens and commands at each stage.
• GoAlert on GKE Autopilot — the same application on Kubernetes, for when you need the other deployment target.
• GoAlert Common — Shared Application Configuration — the configuration shared by both deployment targets.
• Deployed alongside VictoriaMetrics on GKE Autopilot, Loki on Google Cloud Run, Grafana on Google Cloud Run, Uptime Kuma on Google Cloud Run in the Observability & On-call solution.