Alerting profiles

Alerting profiles control the delivery of problem notifications across your organization's alerting channels based on consideration of predefined filters that are based on problem severity, problem duration, custom events, and tags. Alerting profiles allow you to control exactly which conditions result in problem notifications and which don't. This includes all problem-push notifications that are sent via the Dynatrace mobile app and displayed in the Dynatrace web UI. Alerting profiles can also be used to set up filtered problem-notification integrations with third-party messaging systems like Slack, Opsgenie, and PagerDuty.

Each of your monitoring environments has a default alerting profile that defines the level of severity that must be met before an alert is sent out for a detected problem.

Your environment administrator can create new alerting profiles that provide fine-grained control over the routing of problem alerts for individual teams or for third-party problem notification integrations, such as Slack, HipChat, and others.

To view your environment's alerting profiles, go to Settings > Alerting > Alerting profiles. The Default profile is always presented in the list. You can modify but not delete it.

Create an alerting profile

Alerting profiles provide a powerful filtering mechanism for problem notifications. By combining filter criteria, you can create custom profiles that, for example, delay notification of problems in development environments while immediately alerting on problems detected in production environments. To learn how profile criteria are evaluated, read Alerting profiles evaluation.

To create an alerting profile

1. In the Dynatrace menu, go to Settings > Alerting > Alerting profiles.
2. Type a name for the new profile in the Create new alerting profile field and select Create.
3. Define the management zone filter.
   Management zone filtering

   The management zone filter reduces the amount of data the alerting profile evaluates. Instead of checking all the data your environment generates, you can focus on just the parts coming from the specified management zone.

   By default a new alerting profile uses All management zones, which means that no filter is applied. In most cases you should apply the management zone filter to reduce the profile scope to the scope of your teams' responsibility. Keep in mind that management zones can overlap. If a problem is detected on a service that is defined within multiple management zones, multiple filters will be applied.

4. Define the severity-level rules for the profile.
   Severity filtering

   Severity rules filter events based on their severity level. For each alerting profile, you can specify up to 100 severity rules. These rules are combined by the OR logic. An event fulfilling any of the rules triggers a notification based on the profile.

   You can use the following criteria:

   • Severity level.
   • How long the problem is open before an alert is sent out—this enables you to avoid alerts for low-severity problems that don't affect customer experience and therefore don't require immediate attention.
   • optional Monitoring entities that have any or all of the specified tags

   Rule criteria are combined by the AND logic. All of them must be fulfilled for the rule to be invoked.

5. Define the event filter. You can base it either on specific built-in event types (Predefined) or on a title or description of an event (Custom).
   Event filtering

   Event rules filter events based on their properties. For each alerting profile, you can specify up to 20 event rules. Particularly for auto-remediation use cases, it’s helpful to trigger specific actions based on detailed information that’s captured during abnormal situations, for example, triggering alerts in cases where problems are related to process crashes.

   You can use the following criteria:

   • Predefined events Event type
   • Custom events Title and description of the event

   Each of criteria can be inverted by using the negate option. For example, it turns the begins with criterion into does not begin with.

   The rules are combined by the following logic:

   1. All rules that contain negated criteria are grouped by the AND logic.
   2. All other rules are grouped by the OR logic.
   3. These two groups (negated and non-negated) are grouped by the AND logic.

   

6. Review the summary of criteria for your new alerting profile and adapt them if needed.
7. Select Done in the upper-right corner to save the new alerting profile.

Alerting profiles API

In addition to the Dynatrace web UI, you can manage your alerting profiles via the Settings API. Look for the Problem alerting profiles (builtin:alerting.profile) schema.