Alerts (Beta)
Alerts is currently in beta, with new capabilities being phased in gradually. Databases was the first service to be integrated. Additional services will be added over time.
An alert is a notification that signals when something in a service needs attention. In an observability context, alerts are generated when specific conditions are met, such as a metric rising above a threshold. Alerts help you to catch unsual or important changes in behavior early, so you can investigate and resolve issues before they impact users or other parts of your system.
Alerts are valuable because they turn raw monitoring data into actionable information. Instead of constantly watching dashboards, you can rely on alerts to notify you when a service starts operating outside of expected patterns.
Akamai Cloud Pulse enables you to configure alerts to monitors key metrics and events in real time. Key features include:
- System alerts. Predefined system alerts notify users of critical events and service-impacting conditions.
- Custom alert creation. Create custom alerts called user alerts by specifying your own evaluation criteria.
- Alert notifications. Specify the channel that should be used to notify users of important events.
You can configure and manage alerts through Cloud Manager or using the Linode API.
Alert types
There are two types of alerts: system alerts and user alerts.
System alerts
System alerts are preconfigured and trigger automatically when specific metric thresholds are met or exceeded.
Key characteristics:
- Notifications are currently sent via email to all users with read/write access to the impacted entity.
- By default, all entities associated with a service are automatically assigned to that service's system alerts.
- You can assign and unassign entities to a system alert using the Edit functionality.
If you require a custom threshold, create a user alert and then reassign the affected entities from the system alert to your custom user alert.
User alerts
User alerts allow full customization based on your specific operational needs.
Key characteristics:
- You define the metrics thresholds, dimension filters, and notification channels
- One notification channel type is currently supported: email, using the preconfigured Read-Write Channel.
- You can create alerts only for entities within your access scope.
- All entities assigned to an alert must belong to the same account.
Alert parameters
The following alert parameters are preconfigured for system alerts and configurable for user alerts:
| Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
| General Information | |
| Name | Name of the alert |
| Description | Brief summary of the alert's purpose |
| Service | Akamai Cloud service to which the alert applies (for example, Databases) |
| Severity | Alert severity level: info, low, medium, or severe |
| Entities | |
| Region (optional) | Geographic region where the monitored entities reside |
| Entities | Entities assigned to the alert |
| Alert evaluation criteria | |
| Data field | Metric being monitored (for example, CPU Usage) |
| Aggregation type | Statistical method used to aggregate metric values, such as sum, minimum, maximum, average |
| Operator | Comparison operator used for evaluating the threshold, such as >, < , ≥, ≤, = |
| Threshold | Threshold value expressed as a percentage (%) |
| Dimension filter (optional) | Dimensional attribute used to refine or contextualize the data |
| Polling interval | Frequency at which the system checks the metric |
| Evaluation period | Time window used to determine whether the alert should trigger |
| Blip interval | Number of consecutive evaluations meeting alert criteria before the alert fires |
Evaluation criteria
Evaluation criteria determines how metrics, thresholds, dimensions, and time windows interact to decide when an alert should trigger. These criteria ensure alerts fire only when meaningful conditions are met, based on the configured operator, threshold, evaluation period, and blip interval. For more information about supported metrics, dimensions, and their definitions, see the metrics and dimensions reference guides.
Limits and considerations
The following limits apply to alerts:
- Metrics per alert: An alert can monitor up to 5 metrics.
- Dimension Filters per alert: An alert definition can include up to 5 optional dimension filters.
- Entities per alert: An alert can target up to 100 entities.
- User alerts per account: Up to 100 user alerts can be created per account.
- Notification channels per Alert: An alert can be associated with up to 5 notification channels.
Updated 2 days ago