Get notified when a metric crosses a threshold you care about. Each alert watches one data source, can have up to three conditions with their own severity, and notifies by email or through a hook.
What an alert is
An alert is a standing rule. It names one data source, one metric on that source, and a time window to look back over. When the metric crosses the threshold you set, the alert triggers and sends a notification.
Everything an alert needs sits in two steps of one dialog. Setup answers what to watch: which projects, which data source, which metric, and how far back to look. Conditions answers when to speak up and who to tell.
Alerts live under Manage, on their own page at /alerts. The page has two tabs. All alerts is the list of rules you have defined. Activity is the history of times those rules triggered. With no alerts at all, the page is the All alerts list alone, and Activity comes back with the first alert.
An alert is scoped to the projects you pick, not to the project you happen to be looking at. One rule can watch several projects at once, though picking more than one switches the data source to Data points. Each project is checked on its own: the threshold applies to each project's count rather than to their sum, and Activity names the project that crossed it.
Conditions and severity
A single alert carries between one and three conditions. Each condition has its own threshold, its own severity, and its own notification channels, so one rule can stay quiet at a mild reading and page someone at a severe one.
The comparison operator is shared. You set it on the first condition and every other condition inherits it, which is why the operator is a dropdown on the first card and a locked chip with a tooltip on the rest. The three operators are greater than, increased by, and decreased by.
Severity is the same three-way choice for every data source: Critical, Warning, or Info. It does two jobs. It colors the alert in the list and the Activity feed, and it labels each condition inside a multi-condition rule.
A rule with more than one condition is saved as a group: one row per condition, all sharing a group id, identical in every structural field and differing only in severity and threshold. The list renders such a group as one parent row that expands to show its conditions.
Two conditions with the same threshold are refused. The warning appears under the field once you leave it, and the alert cannot be saved until the values differ.
Use Cases
Create your first alert
Get told when something in your product breaks, without reading a dashboard to find out.
- Open Manage, then Alerts, and press New alert.
- On Setup, choose the projects to watch, then the data source, then the metric on that source, then the time window to look back over.
- Move to Conditions. Type the value the metric has to cross, choose a severity, and turn on at least one notification channel.
- Press Create alert.
Warn early, escalate late
Treat a small problem and a large one differently, without maintaining two separate rules that can drift apart.
- Build the alert as usual on the Setup step. The data source, metric, projects, and time window are shared by every condition, so you only define them once.
- On Conditions, set the first condition to the mild reading and give it the Info or Warning severity. Turn on a low-noise channel for it.
- Press Add condition. Set a more severe threshold and give it Critical, with a channel that actually interrupts someone.
- Add a third condition if you need one. Three is the maximum, and the button reports how many you have used.
- Press Create alert.
Because the operator is shared, all three conditions compare the same way. You are only choosing where the lines sit.
Quiet an alert that triggers too often
Stop an alert from notifying anyone for a while, without losing the rule or forgetting to turn it back on.
There are two ways to make an alert stop talking, and they are not the same thing.
- Mute it for a while. Choose Mute from the row's action menu, or from the Activity tab when you are looking at a trigger, and pick 1 hour, 8 hours, 24 hours, 7 days, indefinitely, or a custom end date and time. The rule keeps evaluating; it just does not notify. On a multi-condition alert you can mute one condition and leave the rest awake: use that condition's own row menu, or pick the conditions when muting from the Activity tab. The row shows as Muted and the menu offers Unmute.
- Disable it from the row's action menu. This stops evaluation entirely, not just notification, and it stays off until you enable it again.
A timed mute ends on its own. Once its end time passes, the mute clears by itself within half a minute, without reloading the page.
Find out what triggered
Something notified you, and you want to know what happened before you decide whether it matters.
- Open Alerts and switch to the Activity tab. Triggers arrive newest first, grouped under Today, Yesterday, This week, Last week, and then by month.
- Narrow the feed if it is busy. Filter by severity, change the time range, or turn on Unread only to see what you have not looked at yet.
- Click a trigger to open its detail panel. Opening it marks it as read.
- Read the reading that caused it against the threshold it crossed, and the comparison to what is normal for that metric.
- Act on it. The panel can take you to the underlying alert to change its configuration, or mute it if the answer is that it triggers too often.
Read state is remembered across sessions in your browser, so a trigger you have opened stays read when you come back. It is yours alone: marking something read does not mark it read for your colleagues.
FAQs
What is the difference between muting and disabling an alert?
A muted alert keeps evaluating and simply does not notify, and it unmutes itself when the duration runs out. A disabled alert stops evaluating altogether and stays off until you enable it.
Why can I only pick one project?
Because the data source you chose is evaluated per project. Selecting a second project switches the source to Data points automatically, which is the source the builder offers for more than one project.
Why is the operator greyed out on my second condition?
The comparison is shared by every condition on the alert. It is editable on the first condition, and the rest show it as a locked chip so it is clear they follow it rather than being empty.
I set two conditions and it will not save.
Check whether they have the same threshold. Two conditions on one alert cannot share a threshold value, and the save stays blocked until they differ.
Why does my duplicated alert show as disabled?
Duplicates are created disabled on purpose, so a copy you have not finished editing cannot notify anyone.
Where did my mute go?
Timed mutes expire. Once the end time passes, the mute clears by itself within half a minute, without reloading the page, and the alert returns to Enabled.