Merge pull request #12 from cjoergensen/update-docs

updated readme

README.md

@@ -1,24 +1,100 @@
-# thrifty-elastic-alerting
+# thrifty-elastic-alerting (TEA)
 Are you financially challenged, skint, or just to cheep to purchase an Elastic license? Still, you're desperately yearning for those snazzy Kibana alerting features? Well, look no further because this repository has got your penny-pinching back!
 
-## Quick start guide
+# About this project
+TEA is an open-source project designed for efficient alerting in Elasticsearch environments. It operates as a background process or daemon, continuously monitoring the status of alerting rules. When a change is detected, TEA promptly notifies the relevant recipients, providing a streamlined and responsive alerting system.
 
-Given you're already up and running with an Elastic stack, either using Elastic ECK or using a home backed docker compose setup (see [here for ECK](#ECK) or [here for Docker](#Docker)), the next step is to create a user that TEA will use to monitor alert changes in an index in Elasticsearch.
+TEA has been developed to harness the power of Elastic's alerting rules. For a thorough explanation of this feature and guidance on creating rules, please consult the in-depth documentation available here:
 
-### Create an 'alerting' user in Kibana
+https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/kibana/current/alerting-getting-started.html
 
-Add 
+# Getting started
 
+Given you're already up and running with an Elastic stack the next step is to establish a user dedicated to TEA for monitoring alert changes within an Elasticsearch index. This user must have the `superuser` role to meet TEA's requirements
 
-Thrifty Elastic Alerting need the follow environment variables in order to connect to the Elasticsearch endpoint
+Detailed instructions on creating a user can be found in the official documentation here: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/kibana/current/using-kibana-with-security.html
 
+## Core concepts
+
+### Groups and connectors
+
+In TEA, the concept of `groups` determines the recipient(s) for each alert, while `connectors` specify the methods for delivering alerts to these audiences, such as SMTP.
+
+Alerting rules are associated with groups through tags. When an alerting rule is tagged with a matching group name, the recipients within that group will receive notifications through the specified connector.
+
+For a comprehensive list of supported connectors, please visit: [link to connectors goes here].
+
+### Templates
+
+TEA allows you to personalize the presentation of alerts for each group using the handlebar syntax for templating.
+
+For detailed information and examples, please refer to the template wiki.
+
+## Running TEA
+
+TEA is designed to operate as a background process or daemon. It consistently monitors the status of alerting rules, and upon detecting a change, notifies the relevant groups of the updated state.
+
+### Configuration
+
+To enable TEA to connect to the Elasticsearch endpoint, the following environment variables must be set:
+
+```bash
+Elastic__Url="<elastichost>"          # URL to the Elasticsearch backend, e.g., https://elasticsearch-es-internal-http:9200
+Elastic__KibanaUrl="<kibanaurl>"      # URL to the Kibana frontend
+Elastic__UserName="<username>"        # User with the 'superuser' role
+Elastic__Password="<password>"        # User password
+```
+
+In addition to the environment variables, TEA requires two configuration files:
+
+### `connectors.json`
+
+This file contains the base configuration for connectors. Each connector has its base configuration. Here's an example for the SMTP Connector:
+
+```json
+{
+  "Smtp": {
+    "Sender": "noreply@thrifty-stuff.com",
+    "Host": "smtp.somedomain.com",
+    "Port": 25
+  }
+}
 ```
-Elastic__Url="https://<elastichost>:8200"
-Elastic__UserName="<username>"
-Elastic__Password="<password>"
+
+You can find the base configurations for each connector in the [connectors documentation](<link-to-connectors-documentation>).
+
+### `groups.json`
+
+This file links alerts to connectors. In this example, alerts with the `DevTeam` tag are notified using both the SMTP and MsTeams connectors:
+
+```json
+{
+  "Groups": {
+    "DevTeam": {
+      "Connectors": {
+        "Smtp": {
+          "Recipients": [
+            "devteam@nowhere-to-run.com",
+            "tech-support@nowhere-to-run.com"
+          ]
+        },
+        "MsTeams": {
+          "WebHookUrl": "https://something.webhook.office.com/webhook2/"
+        }
+      }
+    }
+  }
+}
 ```
 
-## Elastic ECK Deployment
+For detailed descriptions and configuration samples, please refer to the [connectors documentation](<link-to-connectors-documentation>).
+
+## Examples
+
+### Docker Compose
+
+### ECK and k8s
+
 <a id="ECK"></a>
 If you're deploying TEA straight into your running ECK stack on Kubernetes, you can use the following deployment YAML to make everything work
 
@@ -120,11 +196,6 @@ spec:
               optional: false
 ```
 
-## Docker comopose deployment
-<a id="Docker"></a>
-``` yaml
-Somethings missing here!
-```
 
 ## To do's
 What is still needed