Once again I have a new tool I have been playing with, once again AI related. One of the tools I have been using is n8n which is a workflow automation platform. It enables us to integrate multiple applications and services through a visual interface. While it is very much an enterprise solution, it is FLOSS and we can deploy it at home, albeit with some caveats and/or workarounds.

One of the really powerful parts of N8n is that we can integrate with various AI platforms, including all the usual suspects: Claude, ChatGPT, etc. Of course I want to keep things local, which N8n caters for with Ollama.

My initial plan is to do react to an alert from Prometheus and give myself some advise about what to do. The plan is pretty simple and adds to my existing Alerts through Telegram:

Alertmanager
  ├─► Telegram (existing)
  └─► n8n webhook
        └─ Python Code (build prompt)
              └─ HTTP Request → Ollama
                    └─ Telegram (post analysis)

1. Alertmanager fires a webhook to n8n alongside the existing Telegram notification
2. n8n builds a prompt from the alert payload and sends it to Ollama
3. Ollama analyses the alert and suggests a fix
4. n8n posts the analysis back to Telegram

So let’s start by getting it installed

Installing n8n on Kubernetes

There is no official Helm chart, but the community-maintained chart is excellent and well maintained. To get started we need:

• Redis which we will install with Helm
• PostgreSQL for which we will use Cloudnative-PG
• Some storage (I will use Longhorn as usual)
• n8n itself

Dependencies first

Before we can do anything else, let’s get Redis and PostgreSQL setup. The simplest is Redis using the Cloud Pirates Helm Chart:

helm --namespace n8n install n8n-redis \
  oci://registry-1.docker.io/cloudpirates/redis \
  -f redis-values.yaml

The contents of redis-values.yaml is very simple:

architecture: standalone
master:
  persistence:
    enabled: true
auth:
  enabled: true

That will create a secret (n8n-redis) to we use later.