Alert Monitoring

You have metrics flowing into Prometheus. You have traces in Jaeger. You have logs in Elasticsearch. Your dashboards show beautiful graphs. There is just one problem: nobody is watching the dashboards at 3 AM when the database runs out of connections.

Observability data is only valuable if it leads to action. Alerting bridges this gap by automatically notifying the right people when something goes wrong. Good alerting catches problems before users notice. Bad alerting wakes people up for non-issues until they start ignoring alerts entirely.

Alerting is deceptively difficult. Too few alerts mean you miss problems. Too many alerts cause alert fatigue. Poorly defined alerts fire during normal operation. Well-designed alerts are actionable, meaning every alert requires human intervention.

In this chapter, you will learn:

This chapter builds on the metrics and monitoring foundation. Alerts transform passive data collection into active incident detection.