
But, simply answering “what” isn’t enough for an actionable alert. Alerts Should Be Actionableĭefining an alert answers the question, “What metrics do I care about?” For example, you might want to trigger an alert after a certain number of failed logins from a single IP address. Each of your alerts should have two key traits: they should be actionable and directed. How do you know when your alerts aren’t effective? The simple answer is that if you’re ignoring them, it’s time to go back and re-assess your alerting policy. We’ll take a look at two guiding principles for designing meaningful alerts, as well as some hands-on examples in Sumo Logic. If you find your primary role is turning into more of an “alert manager” rather than a developer or IT administrator, this post is for you. In the worst cases, we’ve even seen users create filters to automatically send alerts to their trash bin. Indiscriminate alerting makes it nearly impossible to identify important events, let alone actually use them to fix your system.

Tracking everything from critical application errors to shopping cart abandon events might seem like a great idea-until you find an endless stream of alerts bombarding your inbox.

When many of our customers discover real-time alerts, they’re usually so excited to have that kind of visibility into their systems that their first reaction is to set up alerts for whatever they can think of.
