Whenever a new alert policy is created, a threshold has to be set on the basis of which an event will be triggered. A threshold can be a limitation or a standard value against which you can measure if an event has to be triggered.

Few examples:

  1. In Application Performance Monitoring (APM), if a request to the database takes longer than 2 minutes to respond, then it is an issue and you can create an incident.

  2. In Browser Monitoring, if a simple search takes more than a minute to return the results, then it is an issue and an incident has to be created.

  3. In Infrastructure Monitoring, if a particular host utilizes more than 80 % of the CPU, then it is considered an issue and an incident has to be created.

In the said examples, how do we derive what the threshold values are ? Threshold values can be set by you when you’re creating a new rule.

To set a threshold value, follow the below mentioned steps:

  1. Go to Alerting » Alert Policies.

  2. You can either choose an already existing policy or create a new policy.

    • for an existing policy, click on the policy name, which will direct you to a new page where you can add notification channels, edit or delete that policy or create a new rule.
    • clicking on the create new rule button will again direct you to a new page where you can choose the product, project and most importantly set the rule name and threshold values.
    • first, you must define the threshold condition followed by setting the threshold value.
    • by clicking on the warning threshold link, you can set the values or if it is not needed, you can remove it by clicking on the remove the warning threshold link.
    • final step is, providing a rule name in the text box and clicking on the Create rule button.

  3. For a new policy, first create the alert policy and then follow the same procedure as the above steps.

So, based on the threshold defined and its value, an incident will be opened and this triggers an event.