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Create Alarms

There are several ways to create alarms: (1) From the App Details page, in the Alarms tab or, for YARN clusters, the Bottlenecks tab; (2) from chart views; (3) from the Alarms page; (4) by using the Pepperdata REST API. The result is identical regardless of how you create the alarm, so you can choose a method based on its convenience. You might create alarms during your regular workflow of looking at charts while you troubleshoot your clusters, or you might have a big list of alarms for which you know the applicable metrics, and so can quickly create them from the Alarms page.

On This Page

Create Alarms from the App Details Page

There are common sets of application conditions and metrics that can generally be characterized as application-specific conditions for which you’ll want to receive alert notifications via email. Although you could set up charts or manually create complex queries, it’s easier to use the basic alarms management in the Alarms tab of an App Details page. When you create an alarm for a given application, the alarm is for future runs of the same application. (That is, previous application runs are not re-analyzed to determine whether they would have triggered alarms that did not exist when the application actually ran.)

In This Section

Alarms for Application-Specific Conditions: YARN Clusters

In YARN clusters, you can create the following alarms from the Alarms tab:

  • Duration
  • Peak Memory
  • App Failure
  • Total I/O
  • Peak Containers
  • Percentage of Time Doing GC
  • Time Spent Waiting in Queue
  • Time Spent in Straggler Task State

Alarms for Application-Specific Conditions: Kubernetes Clusters

In Kubernetes clusters, you can create the following alarms from the Alarms tab:

  • CPU Requests
  • CPU Used
  • Memory Requests
  • Memory Used
  • Local Read
  • Local Write
  • Object Store Read
  • Object Store Write
  • Heap
  • Non Heap
  • Native Memory
  • NIO
  • GC Time %

Create an Alarm

Procedure

  1. Navigate to the App Details page for the application of interest.

    For detailed steps, see Finding Your Applications.

  2. In the Issues tabs section, click Alarms.

  3. Click the Create Alarm icon (add_alert).

  4. From the settings lists, select the type of alarm to create, such as Duration or Peak Memory.

  5. Configure the alarm.

    The available settings depend on the type of alarm you selected.

  6. (Optional) Add an email override or change the default email override (which is the email address associated with your Pepperdata user account).

    To change the threshold from an upper limit (above which the alarm will fire) to a lower limit (below which the alarm will fire), or the advanced threshold percentages and times, or to add email override addresses for receiving alert notifications when the alarm fires and clears, edit the alarm after you create it; see Edit Alarms. By default, alarms fire when the metric value exceeds the threshold for 1% of the time in any five minute period, and alarms are enabled when you create them. To disable a newly-created alarm, see Disable and Enable Alarms.

  7. Click the Save icon (save).

What to do next

After you create the alarm, you can perform any of the following optional procedures.

  • Reconfigure the alarm; for example, change the advanced threshold settings. See Edit Alarms.
  • Test that the alarm is configured correctly. See Verify Alarms.
  • Disable the alarm (by default, alarms are enabled when you create them). See Disable and Enable Alarms.

Create Alarms From a Chart View

As you proceed through your cluster troubleshooting activities, you’re likely to see system conditions in charts for which you’d like to create an alarm. Or, you might know how to create a chart for conditions that you know to be problematic in your system, but not know the specific Pepperdata metric name that’s required for creating the alarm. In both cases you can take advantage of how easy it is to create alarms from a chart view.

Procedure

  1. Display the chart for the conditions you want to alarm on: time range, metric, and applicable series’ breakdown and filter.

    Unless the chart is created for a specific application—by using the appropriate filter settings for the Application Id or Application Name—the alarm that you create from the chart is applicable for all future runs of all applications.

    Use any of the following methods to display the chart:

    • From the Charts page, select the desired metric, breakdowns, and filters; see Charts.

    • From a table—a Spotlight overview table or a Custom Table—use the View as Chart () feature for the entity that you want to alarm on.

    • From the Resource Usage tab in an App Details page, navigate to the desired chart, and click the Charts icon () to display the chart in its full-width, in the Charts page.

  2. In the top-right of the metric chart, click the Create or View Alarms icon (add_alert), and enter a descriptive name for the alarm and a threshold value, and click the Save icon (save).

    To change the threshold from an upper limit (above which the alarm will fire) to a lower limit (below which the alarm will fire), or the advanced threshold percentages and times, or to add email override addresses for receiving alert notifications when the alarm fires and clears, edit the alarm after you create it; see Edit Alarms. By default, alarms fire when the metric value exceeds the threshold for 1% of the time in any five minute period, and alarms are enabled when you create them. To disable a newly-created alarm, see Disable and Enable Alarms.

    If the metrics chart contains multiple time series, each time series is individually evaluated. Alarms are fired any time any of the series crosses the alarm threshold.

What to do next

After you create the alarm, you can perform any of the following optional procedures.

  • Reconfigure the alarm; for example, change the advanced threshold settings. See Edit Alarms.
  • Test that the alarm is configured correctly. See Verify Alarms.
  • Disable the alarm (by default, alarms are enabled when you create them). See Disable and Enable Alarms.

Create Alarms From the Alarms Page

If you know the metric name for the alarm you want, or know that you want to configure a new alarm that’s very similar to an existing alarm, it’s much easier to create the alarm directly than to generate the appropriate chart from which you can create the alarm.

Procedure

  1. Navigate to the Alarms & Alerts page by either of the following methods:

    • From the “top-nav” menu, click the Alarms icon (), and select View All Alarms.
    • From the “left-nav” menu, select Alarms.

  2. Below the Look Up Alarm search, click the New Cluster Alarm icon (add_alert).

  3. Enter the title and query, and threshold value.

  4. (Optional) To change the default threshold values—below vs. above, and the firing values—revise the Advanced Threshold Options.

    If you skip this step, the alarm is created with the default firing values: values are evaluated to see if they’re above the threshold, and the alarm fires if the metric is above the threshold 1% of the time in any five minute period.

  5. (Optional) To override the default email address for alarm alerts—which is configured in the Alert Connections tab of the Alarms & Alerts page (see Default Email for All Alarms)—enter one or more email override addresses. For multiple email addresses, separate them with a comma, (,).

    Email override addresses override the default Alert Connections email addresses. That is, for alarms with email overrides, the email alerts are sent to the override addresses but not to the default email addresses. PagerDuty alerts are unaffected, and Pepperdata continues to send alerts to PagerDuty for all alarms.

  6. Click Save.

Create Alarms By Using the REST API

For details about the alarms API, including cURL and Python examples, see Alarms API: Create, Retrieve, and Delete Alarms.