Alerts and notifications
Being told when a workload is in trouble, and choosing where that message lands.
On this page
Two halves
Alerts decide when something is worth saying, and they are configured per project. Channels decide where it is said, and they belong to the organization so several projects can share one.
Neither does anything on its own. An alert with no channel is a rule nobody hears; a channel with no alert is a pipe with nothing in it.
Setting up a channel
- Go to Notifications in the organization.
- Add a channel: Slack, email, a generic webhook, Teams, Telegram or Discord.
- Send a test message. Do this now rather than finding out during an incident that the webhook URL was wrong.
Choosing thresholds
Alerts fire on sustained resource pressure rather than on a single spike, and there are three:
| Alert | Fires when |
|---|---|
| CPU | Usage stays above the threshold |
| Memory | Usage stays above the threshold |
| Volume | A volume fills past the threshold |
Volume is the one worth setting carefully. CPU and memory pressure degrade a workload; a full disk stops it, and often takes the data with it.
Thresholds you never act on train you to ignore the channel. If an alert has fired weekly for a month and nobody has done anything, either raise the threshold or fix the workload. A noisy channel is worse than no channel, because it hides the one that matters.
Settings reference
| Setting | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Enabled | off | Whether this project alerts at all. |
| CPU threshold | percent | Sustained CPU above this notifies. |
| Memory threshold | percent | Sustained memory above this notifies. |
| Volume threshold | percent | A volume filling past this notifies. |
| Channel | none | Where the message goes. Configured per organization. |
Limits and gotchas
- Alerts are per project. A new project starts with none, which is a common surprise the first time something fails quietly.
- Channels are per organization. Removing one silences every project that used it.
- This is not an uptime monitor. Alerts describe your workloads from the inside. Whether a visitor can reach your site is a different question, and one an external check answers better.
- Nobody is paged. A message lands in a channel; it does not escalate and does not wake anybody up.
Related
- Volumes, the resource whose alert matters most.
- When something is wrong for what to do once one fires.