Alerting keeps developers up to date on the state of critical metrics in their applications. It enables you to stay ahead of issues and performace degradations.
When a predefined threshold is met, such as a sudden spike in error rates or a significant increase in latencies, an alert is triggered to notify the team. For example, a you may set up an alert to be notified via email or Slack when the CPU utilization of a server exceeds a 85% for an extended period.
You can set up your own DIY alerting with cron jobs to schedule metrics checks on pre-defined intervals and notify you when thresholds are exceeded.
Explore related concepts
Monitoring
Monitoring is the act of tracking the performance and behavior of a system, application, or service in real-time, allowing for the detection of issues, anomalies, and performance bottlenecks. It involves collecting and analyzing metrics to ensure that everything is running smoothly and to identify potential areas for improvement.
Incident Management
Incident Management is the process of identifying, responding to, and resolving incidents that occur within an application. It involves detecting when something goes wrong, alerting the appropriate teams, working to restore normal operations as quickly as possible, and implementing measures to prevent the same issue to occur in the future.
Observability
Observability is the ability to understand how your application is working and behaving in production through telemetry data (logs, metrics, traces, wide events, etc.). It enables you detect, diagnose and resolve issues in your app before they impact your users and become problems.