Creating a new alert involves the following steps:
Select the alert type.
Configure: Establish alert and cautionary limits, specify evaluation durations, and set up advanced alerting features.
Describe: Craft a personalized alert title and message, incorporating values and set a severity.
Communicate: Select the preferred notification methods for your team, such as email, Slack, PagerDuty.
The following section will describe each of these steps in detail.
Select alert type
The first step is to select the type of alert to be handled. Any of the direct or derived metrics on Reveal can be tracked and alerted upon.
Configure
This is where you enter alert details. This is the most critical part of the setup. As someone who creates alerts, you should have the following information:
Metric: Which metric are you tracking? The metric has to be one of those that the product line you are on should support.
Nature of the metric: Is it a continuous trail of data or a discrete one? In other words, is the metric to be chosen from a discrete set of values or a number? Refer to the alert types supported below.
Prior knowledge: Know your data, the threshold you need to set, what is normal, and what needs to be alerted. Feel free to reach out to Reveal if you need help to pick the right metric for your problem.
Ensemble method: When analyzing a continuous stream of data and comparing it with a single number (threshold), a method of aggregating or ensembling the stream of data needs to be specified. The supported ensemble methods are commonly used ones such as less than, greater than, equal to, less than or equal to (le), greater than or equal to (ge), above, below.
Threshold-based alerts
The alerts are extremely configurable. You can:
Trigger an alert when the metric filtered by
Filtered by currency, processor, payment method, country, card scheme. These filters are optional
Is less than, greater than, equal to, le, ge the threshold (# or %)
Over a past nhours or days.
Range-based alerts
To configure continuous data:
Trigger an alert when the metric filtered by
Filtered by currency, processor, payment method, country, card scheme etc. These filters are optional
Is belowthreshold-1 (#, %)ORabovethreshold-2 (#, %)
Over a past nhours or days.
Discrete data is not supported for range-based alerts.
Describe
This involves telling Reveal-alerts the action you would want to take. In this step you can:
Name the alert.
Select a title and a message to describe the alert. This could include a description of the alert or the remedial action you might want your team to take when this alert is encountered.
Add dynamic variables (metrics and their values i.e. every parameter you enter in the configuration step) as a part of the message.
Communicate
The last step in the new alert setup is to:
Select medium: You choose to communicate the alert to. Reveal presently supports alerting via slack.
Select the team: Choose the team you would like to notify this alert to. Reveal provides you with the facility to add your colleagues via the respective handles required for the communication medium.
You are now all set. Reveal-alerts will monitor your stack!