Alerting

What can I set up alerts for in Scout?

Scout supports alerts on app-wide metrics as well as individual endpoints and background jobs. Available metrics include:

Web Requests: - Mean Response Time - 95th Percentile Response Time - Apdex - Error Rate - Throughput - Queue Time

Background Jobs: - Mean Response Time - Error Rate - Throughput - Queue Time

What are the components of Scout’s alerting system?

Scout’s alerting has four components:

1. Notification Channel: A specific destination for alerts (e.g., a Slack channel, PagerDuty service, email address)
2. Notification Group: A collection of channels that receive alerts together
3. Alert Condition: The rule that triggers alerts (e.g., “throughput exceeds 1000 RPM”)
4. Alert Event: Created when an alert condition threshold is crossed (either open or close event)

How do I set up alerting?

Start from your organization’s settings menu and work in this order:

1. Create notification channels (Slack, PagerDuty, email, etc.)
2. Create a notification group and add your channels to it
3. Create an alert condition specifying the metric and threshold
4. Assign the notification group to receive alerts from that condition

What is an Alert Condition?

An alert condition defines when to trigger an alert. You set a metric (like response time or throughput) and a threshold (greater than or less than a value). When the threshold is crossed, an alert event is created.

What is a Notification Group?

A notification group is a collection of notification channels that should all receive the same alerts. When an alert condition fires, all channels in the assigned notification group are notified. This lets you send alerts to multiple destinations simultaneously.

Can I have multiple notification channels of the same type?

Yes. For example, you can have multiple Slack channels notifying different teams, or multiple PagerDuty channels with different severity levels. Each notification channel is independent.

What happens when an alert is resolved?

Scout sends both open and close events. When a condition returns to normal, all notification channels in the group receive a close notification, so your team knows the issue is resolved.