Smart Alerts for Infrastructure
With Smart Alerts, you can automatically receive alerts based on the infrastructure metrics that you select.
Instana suggests the thresholds and remaining configurations for you when you select infrastructure metrics from the list for which you want to receive alerts. You might add multiple alerting channels to the configuration, and Instana automatically creates a customized alert for you.
Adding an alert
To add an alert, do the following steps:
- From the navigation menu in the Instana UI, select Infrastructure.
- Select the Smart Alerts tab.
- Click Add Smart Alert.
The Add Smart Alert opens the alert configuration dialog where you can configure Smart Alerts.
The alert configuration process includes the following steps:
- Define the scope
- Define the threshold for violations
- Define the time threshold about when to be alerted
- Select the alert channels that are to be notified
- Define the alert properties
- Add custom payloads to be included in alerts
Defining the scope
In the Scope section, select a metric from the Metric list. You can select a metric from the list by searching the list by using keywords. Also, you can define the metric scope through regular expressions in the Regex tab. You can also define time aggregation and cross-series aggregations in the Aggregation list. The scope can be further narrowed by adding filters. The metric results can be grouped with the available grouping tags. You can use up to 5 tags for grouping metrics.
Defining the threshold
The public preview version supports only the static threshold option. You can provide different thresholds for the warning and critical severities. Static thresholds do not change over time, it is set when creating or modifying the Smart Alert. The threshold might stop being relevant after the underlying metric is changed significantly. In response, the threshold can be manually adjusted or recalculated at any point in time. You can select a threshold operator to define the threshold condition.
After the scope and threshold is defined, the chart is plotted based on the historic data against the metrics. The maximum of 7 days historic data are available for visualization in the chart. You can switch between the last 24 hours to 7 days of historic data to visualize the historic variations of metric data.
Based on the historic data and threshold conditions the chart displays the alerts that might trigger with the current set threshold value.
If you select any grouping options, the grouping results might appear as a table just after the chart. To analyze the metric data trends in the chart against each grouping, select the respective rows in the table.
Defining the time threshold
For the alert that is triggered, you can add more conditions in the Time threshold section on when the defined threshold for the selected metric is violated.
The following typical conditions, often used in practice, are as follows:
- Persistence over time: Select a time window and the number of consecutive times of violation. You receive an alert when the metric violates a defined threshold over the defined time window.
Adding alert channels
To add alert channels, do the following steps:
- Click Select Alert Channel.
- From the list of preconfigured channels, select the channels from which you want to receive the alerts.
For more information about creating channels, see Alert Channels.
Selecting alert properties
Optional: Add more alert properties.
Adding more alert properties provides you with the additional configuration that best suits your needs. You can edit the current title and description of the alert, define the alert level (warning or critical), and also select whether the alert triggers an incident. For more information, see Alerting.
Adding custom payloads
To include an extra payload that is relevant to you in alert notifications for specific alert configuration that is sent by Instana, click Add Row in the Custom Payloads section.
For more information about custom payloads, see Configure Custom Payload Globally.
Both global custom payload and alert-specific custom payload are included in alert notifications if applicable, but the alert-specific configuration has priority over the global configuration. As a result, if you use the same key, the value of the global custom payload field is overridden by the alert-specific one.
The following image shows globally defined custom payloads that are used in the alert configuration:
As of now, public preview supports only static custom payload.