Overview
Alerting ensures that issues are addressed before they impact users. Effective alerting requires a balance between catching critical problems and avoiding 'alert fatigue' caused by too many non-actionable notifications.
Key Concepts
- Thresholds: The specific values that trigger an alert (e.g., Error Rate > 5%).
- Notification Channels: How the alert is delivered (e.g., Slack, PagerDuty, Email).
- Severity Levels: Categorizing alerts (e.g., Critical, Warning, Info).
- Silencing/Inhibition: Temporarily disabling alerts during maintenance or to prevent duplicate notifications.
Best Practices
- Actionable Alerts: Every alert should have a clear set of steps to resolve it.
- Symptoms over Causes: Alert on user-facing issues (e.g., high latency) rather than internal details (e.g., high CPU).