Alerting

As explained in Cloud Observability in Action

An alert is a notification or triggered condition indicating that a monitored service or infrastructure condition requires attention.

Alerting automates checks for conditions that require attention and informs the person responsible for a service or infrastructure. Alerts may be triggered conditions, while alarms can group multiple alerts. section 7.0

Effective alerting connects operational signals to an incident workflow:

• Monitor reachability, endpoint status, performance, or simulated user journeys. section 7.1.1
• Compare observations with a manually observed or automatically detected healthy baseline. section 7.1.1
• Notify the owner responsible for investigating and responding to abnormal behavior. section 7.0

Cloud-provider alerting

Cloud-native teams can use Amazon CloudWatch alarms with SNS email or SMS notifications, Azure Monitor Alerts with email, SMS, or push notifications, or Google Cloud alerting with notification types including email and Pub/Sub. Grafana can provide a unified view over some provider data sources. section 7.2.3

Figure 7.1 CloudWatch, an example of synthetic monitoring, tracking the availability of a website

Synthetic monitoring illustrates how automated checks can track website availability from an end-user perspective. section 7.1.1

How Cloud Observability in Action covers it

How deep it goes

Defines alerting, baselines, and monitoring approaches, then surveys Prometheus, Grafana, and cloud-provider offerings without implementation detail.

Examples

Uses endpoint checks, simulated user journeys, CloudWatch alarms, Azure Monitor Alerts, Google Cloud alerting, SNS, and Pub/Sub.

What it assumes

Assumes familiarity with monitored services and telemetry while introducing baselines, synthetic monitoring, and alerting terminology.

What you can do after

Operate alerting by selecting monitoring checks, establishing baselines, and routing notifications to responsible owners.

How it connects

Connects health monitoring, synthetic monitoring, anomaly detection, incidents, service ownership, and service-level objectives.

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Also explained in

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  Amazon Web Services in Action, Third Edition: An in-depth guide to AWSA CloudWatch alarm is a monitoring rule that evaluates metrics against configured conditions and can initiate actions when those conditions are met.
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  100 SQL Server Mistakes and How to Avoid ThemAlerting is the automated notification of personnel or systems when an event requires investigation or corrective action.
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  MongoDB 8.0 in Action, Third EditionAn alert is a configured notification generated when a monitored database, user, account, or deployment condition is met.
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  Apache Kafka in ActionAn alerting mechanism is a system function that detects specified conditions and notifies operators when they occur.
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  Machine Learning Platform EngineeringAlerting is the process of generating and delivering notifications when monitored application, system, or infrastructure conditions require attention.
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  Delivering Machine Learning Projects: From design to deploymentAlerting is the generation and delivery of notifications when monitored conditions indicate an issue or threshold violation.
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  Microsoft Azure in ActionA smart alert is an automated monitoring notification that can use metrics, logs, or dynamic thresholds to identify and report problems.
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  Architecting an Apache Iceberg LakehouseAlerting is the automated generation and delivery of notifications when monitored data satisfies configured conditions.
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  Cyber Threat HuntingA security alert is a notification that recorded activity matches conditions associated with potentially suspicious or malicious behavior.

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Related concepts

• monitoringused by · Monitoring is the ongoing observation and measurement of a system’s behavior, state, or operational signals to assess its condition and detect changes or problems.
• metricuses · A metric is a quantitative measure used to characterize or assess a property, condition, behavior, performance, or outcome.
• Alertmanagerused by · Alertmanager is a Prometheus component that groups, routes, silences, suppresses, and delivers alerts to notification channels.
• PromQLuses · PromQL is Prometheus’s query language for selecting, filtering, aggregating, transforming, and analyzing multidimensional time-series metrics.
• Prometheusconfigured by · Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting system that collects, stores, and queries time-series metrics.
• thresholdconfigures · A threshold is a boundary value against which a quantity is compared to determine whether a condition is met or an action or decision is triggered.

This explainer was generated by Manning's knowledge graph from the text of Cloud Observability in Action. The section links point to the parts of the book it draws on.