Introducing Alerts: Improving How You Identify System Issues

At the end of last year, we expanded upon our Policies menu by introducing the concepts of Open and Closed policies. To better surface this new feature, we’ve created a new menu called Alerts.

So, what is an alert?

In short, Alerts are polices that have violated some preset condition(s). Alerts are categorized by their activity to better help you distinguish between troubleshooting use cases (open) and post-mortem activities (closed). This is great for when you need to drill down into what’s happening now—with just a few simple clicks, you are able to see all open policies.

Types of Alerts

Policies (set of alerting conditions) fall into three categories:

• Open: Policy is firing
• Closed: Policy has fired
• No Status: Policy has not fired (green)

Open alerts are not tied to time controls because they are happening in the moment. Closed alerts are tied to time controls. This feature shows any policy that fired during your selected time range.

Current Customers

This enhancement does not require any changes to your policies. Alerts is simply a new set of features that make it easier for you to navigate all the policies you have created within Metricly. The only change for you to be aware of is a minor tweak in terminology; specifically, Alerts being a categorical condition of policies. Because of this update, Alerts has replaced Policies in the top navigation bar—but all the same features you are familiar with remain.

New Alerts Page

Tips for Using Alerts

1. Alerts will now replace Policies in the top navigation bar.
2. Single click to filter down open alerts by category.
3. Show all Policies is the same as clicking on “policies” in the old view.
4. You can now create Policies from the menu or Policy page.
5. Select the time range for the “closed” alerts.
6. Don’t forget to click on the policy name to see more details.

First Time Users

Just a friendly reminder:

• A policy is a configurable set of conditions in Metricly that produces alerts.
• Notifications are configurable within policies to provide additional options for receiving those alerts through products like PagerDuty or Slack.

About the Author

Jason Simpson

Jason is the former Product Manager @ Metricly.