DEVOPSdigest

Datadog introduced “Composite Alerts” to its platform, enabling DevOps teams to reduce time spent managing insignificant alerts.

With Composite Alerts, DevOps teams can avoid unnecessary alerts by constraining the conditions that cause an alert to fire in the first place. Composite Alerts work by allowing customers to create customizable combinations of symptoms that often cause major outages, separating signal from noise and accurately identifying major issues within infrastructure and applications.

“We’re thinking more intently about how teams can leverage all of the data we provide to set more useful and meaningful alerts,” said Steve Boak, Senior Product Designer at Datadog. “IT operations often has a ‘better safe than sorry’ mentality, which can lead to noise and unnecessary false alarms. Being able to fine tune very specific conditions will not only reduce this noise, but escalate potentially disastrous issues as efficiently as possible.”

Composite Alerts can be set for any combination of performance indicators and can add critical nuance to alerting conditions. For instance, an alert may be necessary when the message queues grow too long, but not when a service restarts which can cause temporary queue growth and trigger false alarms. In this case, a Composite Alert can be created that triggers only when queue length crosses a threshold and the uptime for the service is greater than 10 minutes. Teams can then disable notifications from the original singular alert to reduce the total number of alerts they receive, which is especially useful for running distributed applications and microservices where myriad services are interdependent.

Composite alerts are available immediately for all Datadog customers.