Create and manage rules

Required role

The Editor role or higher is required to create and manage rules for alerting. To learn more, refer to Assign user roles and privileges.

Alerting enables you to define rules, which detect complex conditions within different apps and trigger actions when those conditions are met. Alerting provides a set of built-in connectors and rules for you to use.

Observability rules

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Learn more about Observability rules and how to create them:

Rule type	Name	Detects when…
AIOps	Anomaly detection	Anomalies match specific conditions.
APM	APM anomaly	The latency, throughput, or failed transaction rate of a service is abnormal.
Observability	Custom threshold	An Observability data type reaches or exceeds a given value.
Stack	Elasticsearch query	Matches are found during the latest query run.
APM	Error count threshold	The number of errors in a service exceeds a defined threshold.
APM	Failed transaction rate threshold	The rate of transaction errors in a service exceeds a defined threshold.
Metrics	Inventory	The infrastructure inventory exceeds a defined threshold.
APM	Latency threshold	The latency of a specific transaction type in a service exceeds a defined threshold.
SLO	SLO burn rate rule	The burn rate is above a defined threshold.

Creating rules and alerts

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You start by defining the rule and how often it should be evaluated. You can extend these rules by adding an appropriate action (for example, send an email or create an issue) to be triggered when the rule conditions are met. These actions are defined within each rule and implemented by the appropriate connector for that action e.g. Slack, Jira. You can create any rules from scratch using the Manage Rules page, or you can create specific rule types from their respective UIs and benefit from some of the details being pre-filled (for example, Name and Tags).

For APM alert types, you can select Alerts and rules and create rules directly from the Services, Traces, and Dependencies UIs.
For SLO alert types, from the SLOs page open the More actions menu for an SLO and select Create new alert rule. Alternatively, when you create a new SLO, the Create new SLO burn rate alert rule checkbox is enabled by default and will prompt you to Create SLO burn rate rule upon saving the SLO.

After a rule is created, you can open the More actions menu and select Edit rule to check or change the definition, and/or add or modify actions.

From the action menu you can also:

Disable or delete rule
Clone rule
Snooze rule notifications
Run rule (without waiting for next scheduled check)
Update API keys

View rule details

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Click on an individual rule on the Rules page to view details including the rule name, status, definition, execution history, related alerts, and more.

A rule can have one of the following responses:

failed: The rule ran with errors.
succeeded: The rule ran without errors.
warning: The rule ran with some non-critical errors.

Snooze and disable rules

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The rule listing enables you to quickly snooze, disable, enable, or delete individual rules.

When you snooze a rule, the rule checks continue to run on a schedule but the alert will not trigger any actions. You can snooze for a specified period of time, indefinitely, or schedule single or recurring downtimes.

When a rule is in a snoozed state, you can cancel or change the duration of this state.

To temporarily suppress notifications for all rules, create a maintenance window.

Import and export rules

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To import and export rules, use Saved Objects.

Rules are disabled on export. You are prompted to re-enable the rule on successful import.

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