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Level 0 / Project 13 - Alarm Message Generator

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Concept This project — Quiz Flashcards Diagram Browser

Estimated time: 30 minutes

Focus

  • template strings and alert text building

Why this project exists

Parse pipe-delimited alarm records, sort them by severity, and generate formatted notification messages. You will learn delimiter parsing, priority ordering with a lookup dict, and template-based text generation.

Run (copy/paste)

Use <repo-root> as the folder containing this repository's README.md.

cd <repo-root>/projects/level-0/13-alarm-message-generator
python project.py --input data/sample_input.txt
pytest -q

Expected terminal output

=== Alarm Notifications ===

  [CRITICAL] web-server-01: CPU usage above 95%
  [WARNING]  db-primary: Replication lag 30 seconds
  [INFO]     load-balancer: Health check passed

Summary: 1 critical, 1 warning, 1 info
Output written to data/output.json
5 passed

Expected artifacts

  • data/output.json
  • Passing tests
  • Updated notes.md

Checkpoint: Baseline code runs and all tests pass. Commit your work before continuing.

Alter it (required) — Extension

  1. Add a --severity filter flag that shows only alarms at or above a given severity level.
  2. Add timestamps to each alarm notification (use a hardcoded time for reproducibility).
  3. Re-run script and tests.

Break it (required) — Core

  1. Add a line with an unknown severity like unknown|server01|disk full -- does parse_alarm() reject it?
  2. Add a line with missing fields like critical| -- does it crash or handle gracefully?
  3. Add a line with extra pipe characters -- does the parser split correctly?

Fix it (required) — Core

  1. Ensure parse_alarm() validates severity against the allowed list (critical, warning, info).
  2. Handle lines with fewer than 3 pipe-delimited fields by raising ValueError.
  3. Add a test for the unknown-severity edge case.

Checkpoint: All modifications done, tests still pass. Good time to review your changes.

Explain it (teach-back)

  1. Why does sort_by_severity() use a priority dict {"critical": 0, "warning": 1, "info": 2} instead of alphabetical sorting?
  2. What does the pipe | delimiter offer over commas when data might contain commas?
  3. Why does alarm_summary() count by severity level instead of just total count?
  4. Where would alarm formatting appear in real software (monitoring dashboards, PagerDuty, incident management)?

Mastery check

You can move on when you can: - run baseline without docs, - explain one core function line-by-line, - break and recover in one session, - keep tests passing after your change.

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