As consumers of alerts, you want every alert to be easy to understand, meaningful, and actionable. But when systems bombard you with alerts for metrics you don't need, it's hard to distinguish between the signal of what matters from the noise of what doesn't (cue alert fatigue). Claude Debussy said, “Music is the space between the notes.” That space enables resonation and expression. Music needs a degree of emptiness to be truly appreciated, and the same holds true when it comes to alerting.

We've listened to your feedback and have significantly improved our synthetics alerting capabilities to help reduce the noise and increase alert accuracy. The changes we've made with Synthetics Alerting give our customers the ability to receive more detailed alert notifications, while giving you agency over the individual metrics that are critical to your success – and perhaps more importantly, the ability to silence the metrics that are not. 

Flexible Health Options

For a long time, we have set extreme thresholds to disable certain metrics from causing an unhealthy health status in our tests. While this technically works, it does not make for a great user experience. As part of the new Alerting stack, the Synthetics team developed new switches that allow for individual metrics to be enabled or disabled when determining an unhealthy status and ultimately, an alert notification.

Single Metric Alerting & Improved Alert Notifications

Another big improvement to Synthetics Alerting is the change to alert tracking by single metrics. The system now keeps track of triggers for each health-enabled metric and will trigger alerts for them individually. When combined with Flexible Health Options, users can tailor their alerts to only the metrics that fit their use case. This provides more clarity of what is going wrong with a test when receiving an alert.