Alerting center

Beta

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The Alerting Centre is a beta-phase feature developed by Nobl9 to manage site reliability and respond to production issues efficiently. It provides a centralized reference dashboard where you can access a heat-mapped timeline displaying all past and active alerts related to Service Level Objectives.

Using Nobl9 Alerting Center you can get:

Centralized alert management

Instead of navigating through individual SLOs to identify alerts, you can access the Alerting Centre to see all alerts in one place.

Heatmap and timeline visualization

The Alerting Centre categorizes alerts into 60 buckets, using a heatmap to show their intensity. Each bucket with active alerts allows navigation to affected SLOs for further action. These help in pinpointing high-alert areas and prioritizing team responses.

Efficient troubleshooting

With all alerts displayed chronologically in Alerting Center, you can quickly identify patterns or clusters of alerts to understand the root causes of issues more effectively.

Flexible filtering

The Alerting Centre allows you to filter alerts by status and group them by resources. You can focus on specific subsets of alerts based on their priority and relevance to the current operational context.

Overview

You can access Alerting Center from the Alerts tab in the main navigation panel.

Image 1: Main view of alerting center

Alerting Center and RBAC

The Alerting Center displays all alerts for SLOs in projects where you have at least view permission. See RBAC for more details.

Heatmap

By default, the Alerting Center displays alerts fired in your organization in the last 24 hours. You can choose a larger time window by clicking on the time window picker and selecting the desired range:

Image 2: Choosing time window

Heatmap buckets

The display unit of the Alerting Center consists of 60 buckets that are used to aggregate data. The level of aggregation increases as you extend the time window.

As you can see in the example below, if you select a time window of 1 hour, each visible bucket will aggregate data for 60 seconds. By the same token, if you choose a 24-hour time window, each bucket will aggregate data for 24 minutes. Finally, for a 1-week window, each bucket will represent 168 minutes.

Image 3: Different levels of aggregations for larger time windows

Groupings and filters

The Alerting Center allows you to group alerts on the heatmap by projects, services, alert policies and SLOs. You can also filter the Alerting Center heatmap further by statuses (triggered, resolved) and severity (low, medium, high).

Groupings allow you to organize and visualize alerts in one click based on different aspects of your system, providing a comprehensive understanding of their alerting patterns.

useful tips

• Group by services to find the most alerting services in your organization.

• Filtering by Triggered status only is an easy way to monitor all alerts that are currently active in your organization.

Image 4: Selecting different groupings in Alerting Center

Sorting by resource's name

The resources shown on the alert heatmap are currently sorted in alphabetical order based on their names. However, the legend on the heatmap's y-axis only displays their display names.

Consequently, you may notice in some cases that display names are not in the proper order. For instance, in the example given below, the SLO for intake response (response-duration) has a name starting with 'r', which causes it to be displayed after newrelic-rolling-timeslices-threshold.

Image 5: Sorting by names in alerts heatmap

Groupings and navigation to other tabs in Nobl9 web

When you click on any colored bucket on the heatmap, Nobl9 will display the list of all affected SLOs where alert fired in the specific time frame.

tip

Currently, clicking the SLO links on the heatmap doesn't preserve filtering by severity on the SLO Details > Alerts view. To continue browsing through the heatmap with preserved filters and grouping, return to the browser tab you were redirected from.

Limitations overview

The Alerting Center during its beta phase has the following limitations:

• It displays the most recent 20000 alerts within your organization.
• Resource presentation on the alert heatmap is currently alphabetically sorted by their names, not displayNames.
• Clicking on SLO links in the heatmap doesn't retain filtering by severity in the SLO details > Alerts view.
• Labels for active alerts and severity remain unchanged when filtering through the heatmap view.