Alert types and settings
Akamai Cloud Pulse supports two types of alerts: preconfigurable system alerts and customizable user alerts. Together, they provide default monitoring for common service health conditions while allowing you to define custom alert behavior as needed. Most environments use a combination of system and user alerts to surface conditions requiring attention.
Supported servicesAlerts are currently in limited availability for Databases, NodeBalancers, Object Storage, and Logs. Support for additional services is planned for future releases.
Alert types
There are two types of alerts: preconfigured system alerts and custom user alerts.
System alerts
System alerts are preconfigured alerts that automatically monitor common service health conditions and notify you when alert conditions are met.
A system alert:
- Uses predefined metrics, thresholds, and evaluation behavior managed by Akamai Cloud Pulse
- Automatically triggers when one or more pre-defined metric thresholds are met
- Applies automatically to all entities associated with the service, with the option to manually include or exclude specific entities
- Sends alert notifications to the users associated with the configured notification channel who have access to the selected entities
User alerts
User alerts are configurable alerts that allow you to define monitoring behavior based on your operational requirements.
A user alert:
- Supports configurable metrics, thresholds, dimensions, and evaluation behavior
- Automatically triggers when one or more user-defined metric thresholds are met
- Applies only to entities within your access scope, and requires that all selected entities belong to the same account
- Sends alert notifications to the users associated with the configured notification channel who have access to the selected entities
Alert settings
Alert settings define how Akamai Cloud Pulse evaluates metrics determines when alert conditions are met, and sends notiifications to users.
General information
General information settings define the identity, severity, and scope of the alert.
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| Name | The name of the alert |
| Description | A brief description of the alert's purpose |
| Service | The cloud service associated with the alert |
| Severity | The severity level assigned to the alert: info, low, medium, or severe |
| Scope | The level at which the alert applies: account, region, or entity |
| Region | The geographic regions included in evaluation when the scope is set to Region |
| Entities | The entities included in alert evaluation when the scope is set to Entity |
Available scope options and related settings depend on the selected service.
Evaluation criteria
Evaluation criteria determine how metrics, thresholds, dimensions, and time windows are evaluated to trigger alerts.
For more information about the metrics and dimensions supported for each service, see the Metrics reference.
Group by
Use Group by to evaluate alert conditions independently for each dimension value.
When metric data is grouped by one or more dimensions, alert conditions are evaluated separately for each resulting group. For example, if you group CPU Usage by node type, CPU usage is evaluated separately for each node type instead of evaluating all node types collectively.
You can select up to five dimensions to group by.
Metric data is grouped by Entity by default. This is mandatory for all services except Object Storage, where grouping is optional and Entity can be removed.
Group by differs from dimension filtering, which limits the metric data included in evaluation.
Metric settings
Metric settings define the metric data to include in alert evaluation.
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| Data field | The metric monitored by the alert (for example, CPU Usage) |
| Aggregation type | The statistical method used to aggregate metric values over time: sum, minimum, maximum, or average |
| Dimension filter | An optional dimension filter used to refine or contextualize the metric data during evaluation (for example, filtering Databases CPU usage by node type) |
Threshold settings
Threshold settings define the conditions used to determine when an alert threshold is met.
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| Operator | The comparison operator used to evaluate the metric against the threshold: >, < , ≥, ≤, or = |
| Threshold | The value used to determine when the metric meets the alert condition, expressed as a percentage (%) |
Trigger conditions
Trigger condition settings define how long conditions must persist before an alert is triggered.
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| Polling interval | The frequency at which the system evaluates the metric data: 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or 1 hour |
| Evaluation period | The time window over which the metric condition must be met before the alert is triggered: 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or 1 hour |
| Blip interval | The number of consecutive evaluations that must meet the alert condition before the alert is triggered |
Updated 5 days ago