View and manage alerts

View, manage, and investigate Cloud Observability alerts.

Alerts page

View alerts and status

Use the Alerts page to find, react to, and fix problems in your system.

The Alerts page lists configured alerts, their statuses, and details. To open the page, click Alerts in Cloud Observability’s sidebar.

Alert statuses

By default, the Alerts page lists all alerts by status, with Warning and Critical alerts at the top. Alerts have the following statuses:

  • Critical

    The alert violates the critical threshold.

  • No data

    The alert has no data to evaluate. Cloud Observability isn’t receiving any relevant data for the alert.

  • Ok

    The alert is active and is in a non-triggered state. Cloud Observability is analyzing inbound traffic against the alert criteria.

  • Unknown

    The alert exists, but it’s not active yet. Try refreshing the page to get the alert’s latest status.

    If the status remains Unknown, click the alert. The message Your alert will activate in X days when Cloud Observability has enough data to run the alert query indicates the number of days until Cloud Observability activates the alert.

  • Warning

    The alert violates the warning threshold.

If the alert is grayed out, the alert is in a snoozed state.

You can also visualize and track alerts and their statuses on dashboards. Learn about alerts lists.

Manage alerts

Delete alerts

Delete alerts to update your monitoring strategy and help alert recipients focus on the most important notifications.

Follow these steps to delete an alert:

  1. In Cloud Observability, click Alerts.
  2. On the Alerts page, find the relevant alert and click ⋮ > Delete.

  3. In the Delete alert? dialog, click Yes, delete.

    You won’t be able to recover your alert.

Cloud Observability deletes the alert and returns you to the Alerts page.

Snooze alerts

Snooze alerts to manage notifications and prevent alert fatigue during scheduled maintenance, temporary issues, and ongoing investigations.

Follow these steps to snooze an alert:

  1. In Cloud Observability, click Alerts.
  2. On the Alerts page, find and click the relevant alert.

  3. Click the Snooze drop-down, select the snooze timeframe, and click Apply.

    Cloud Observability displays Snoozed until X.

  4. Return to the Alerts page to view your snoozed alert.

The snoozed alert is grayed out. Cloud Observability still updates the alert’s status but doesn’t send notifications. You can see the time the alert reactivates by hovering over the Snoozed column.

Follow these steps to manually un-snooze an alert:

  1. In Cloud Observability, click Alerts.
  2. On the Alerts page, find and click the relevant alert.
  3. Click the Snooze drop-down, click Off, and click Apply.

Cloud Observability displays Turned off snooze.

Investigate correlations

Use Cloud Observability’s correlation feature to investigate triggered alerts and find possible causes:

  1. In Cloud Observability, click Alerts.
  2. On the Alerts page, find and click the relevant alert.
  3. In the chart, click the area of the chart you want to analyze and then click View correlations.

Cloud Observability displays the View correlations panel and the results. To learn more about this feature, visit Investigate deviations.

The correlation feature works on metric and span alerts only.

Integrate and export alerts

Add alerts to notebooks

During investigations, add alert charts to notebooks to do the following:

  • View alert charts alongside other charts.
  • Run ad hoc queries without affecting alert configurations.
  • Take notes in text blocks.
  • Save your analysis for postmortems.

Follow these steps to add an alert chart to a notebook:

  1. In Cloud Observability, click Alerts.
  2. On the Alerts page, find and click the relevant alert.
  3. Click Add to notebook and either select an existing notebook or create a new one.

Cloud Observability opens the notebook in a new tab. The chart title matches the alert name, and the subtitle links to the original alert.

Export alerts to Terraform

If you use Terraform, streamline alert management by exporting a baseline Cloud Observability alert to a Terraform file.

Because it’s easier to create alerts in a UI, create a baseline Cloud Observability alert and export it to a Terraform file. You can then copy and edit that file to create new alerts, for example, by updating the alert query.

Follow these steps to export an existing Cloud Observability alert to a Terraform file:

  1. In Cloud Observability, click Alerts.
  2. On the Alerts page, find and click the relevant alert.
  3. Click ⋮ > Export to Terraform.

Cloud Observability creates a .tf file you can download to any local directory.

See also

Create alerts

Manage notification destinations

Sample alerts

Updated Mar 14, 2024