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Version: NG-3.1

Alert Configuration Studio

Overview​

vuSmartMaps now offers a modern and significantly more powerful alerting experience through its enhanced NG Alert Engine framework, designed to help operational teams detect issues faster, respond proactively, and maintain high operational reliability. This new system streamlines alert creation into a unified 7-step workflow, allowing users to build highly flexible rules that combine sophisticated metric evaluation (using expressions and advanced scripting), dynamic content generation, and multi-channel notifications. By focusing on precision, actionable detail, and consistency across all channels, this intelligent alerting model ensures that every notification is meaningful, providing the rich contextual and business-aware configurations needed for immediate and effective response.

Key Features of vuSmartMaps Alert Configuration Studio:

  • Simplified and structured alert creation: The Alert Configuration Studio provides a guided, step-by-step workflow that makes it easy to create alert rules. Clear separation of sections such as data selection (Data Models), alert evaluation logic, additional information and metrics, and notification channels helps users configure alerts quickly and consistently.
  • High-performance alert processing: The alert engine is designed to process alerts efficiently, supporting parallel evaluation of multiple alert rules to handle large alert volumes with minimal delay.
  • Resource-efficient alerting framework: The NG Alert Engine is optimized to manage a large number of alert rules while consuming minimal system resources, making it suitable for enterprise-scale monitoring environments.
  • Highly configurable alert logic: Users can define alert behavior using thresholds, multiple evaluation conditions, logical expressions, and scripting. This flexibility allows alerts to be tailored to a wide range of technical and business scenarios.
  • Alarm and non-alarm alert modes: Alert rules can operate in alarm mode to track active and clear states, helping reduce notification noise, or in non-alarm mode for event-based or informational alerts.
  • Rich alert enrichment and context: Alerts can be enriched with summaries, descriptions, tags, additional metrics, custom fields, and related dashboards, ensuring notifications are meaningful and actionable.
  • Extensive notification channel support: Alerts can be delivered through multiple channels such as Email, SMS, WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zoho Cliq, Mobile Push Notifications, Runbook Automation, Auto Remediation, and more, ensuring timely communication to the right stakeholders.
  • Visibility of generated alerts: Once configured and enabled, alerts generated by the Alert Configuration Studio can be monitored through notification channels and accessed centrally from the Alert Console.

Why This Feature Is Useful​

  • Alert Configuration Studio enables organizations to proactively detect operational issues, performance degradations, threshold breaches, and business-impacting events across applications, infrastructure, and services. It provides a centralized framework for defining alert evaluation logic, enriching alert content, and delivering notifications through multiple communication channels.
  • By combining metric-based evaluation, custom expressions, scripting capabilities, alarm state management, and contextual alert enrichment, the NG Alert Engine helps operational teams reduce Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR). It ensures that alerts are actionable, meaningful, and delivered to the appropriate stakeholders for faster incident response.

Example Scenario​

A platform administrator wants to monitor CPU utilization across production Linux servers. Using the Alert Configuration Studio, the administrator creates an alert rule that monitors CPU usage, evaluates the metric over the last five minutes, and triggers a Critical alert when utilization exceeds the defined threshold. The alert is enriched with additional metrics, linked dashboards, and tags, and notifications are configured for Email, Microsoft Teams, and Slack. When CPU usage crosses the threshold, the NG Alert Engine generates the alert, delivers notifications to the configured channels, and displays the alert in the Alert Console for further investigation.

When to Use This Feature​

Use Alert Configuration Studio when you need to:

  • Monitor critical infrastructure, applications, services, and business transactions.
  • Generate alerts based on metric threshold breaches.
  • Detect abnormal system behavior using custom evaluation logic.
  • Correlate multiple monitoring conditions into a single alert.
  • Create alarm-based monitoring workflows with active and clear states.
  • Configure event-driven notifications for operational teams.
  • Send alerts through Email, SMS, WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zoho Cliq, and other channels.
  • Enrich alerts with contextual metrics, dashboards, tags, and custom fields.
  • Automate incident response through Runbook Automation and Auto Remediation.
  • Monitor SLA, performance, availability, and business KPIs.
  • Reduce alert noise using advanced evaluation logic and alarm management.
  • Implement enterprise-wide observability and incident management workflows.

Comprehensive Understanding​

The Alert Configuration Studio provides a centralized interface for creating, managing, and monitoring alert rules using the NG Alert Engine.

The module allows you to:

  • View and manage configured alert rules.
  • Create alert rules using a guided seven-step workflow.
  • Configure evaluation conditions using thresholds, custom expressions, or Starlark scripts.
  • Enrich alerts with summaries, descriptions, dashboards, tags, metrics, and custom fields.
  • Configure multiple notification channels, including Email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp, SMS, and Tickets.
  • Test alert execution before enabling production monitoring.
  • Monitor generated alerts through the Alert Console and configured notification channels.

Step-by-step instructions​

Follow these steps to create and activate an alert rule:

  1. Navigate to Observability Studios → Alert Configuration Studio.
  2. Review existing alert rules or create a new alert configuration.
  3. Configure the alert's basic details including name and description.
  4. Define one or more alert evaluation conditions.
  5. Select the Data Model and metric to be monitored.
  6. Configure evaluation duration and threshold criteria.
  7. Define alert generation logic using predefined conditions, custom expressions, or evaluation scripts.
  8. Configure alert content including summary, description, severity, tags, dashboards, and additional contextual information.
  9. Select and configure notification channel groups.
  10. Configure notification delivery settings and re-notification behavior.
  11. Configure advanced execution controls, evaluation frequency, and alarm mode settings.
  12. Execute a test run to validate alert behavior.
  13. Review the generated results and verify alert conditions.
  14. Enable the alert rule for production monitoring.

Working with Alert Configuration Studio​

Create an Alert Rule​

workflow in vuSmartMaps follows a guided seven-step configuration process that makes alert creation simple, consistent, and more powerful.

Every alert rule can be created using the same 7 steps:

  1. Basic Details
    1. Provide the alert name, description, severity, and tags. These details help identify and categorize the alert.
  2. Alert Evaluation Conditions
    1. Define the conditions that determine when the alert should trigger.
    2. Select Data Models, metrics, evaluation duration, thresholds, expressions, or Starlark scripts to build the alert logic.
  3. Generate Content for the Alert
    1. Specify what information is included in the generated alert document, such as summary, description, dashboards, severity, and additional custom metrics or fields.
  4. Alert Notification Channels
    1. Choose where notifications should be delivered.
    2. Configure Email, SMS, WhatsApp, Teams, Slack, Mobile Push, Tickets, Runbook Scripts, Auto Remediation, and more.
  5. Additional Controls
    1. Control evaluation frequency, enable/disable alarm mode, configure throttling, set notification windows (working hours/weekends), and add advanced YAML configurations.
  6. Test Execution
    1. Validate the alert against live or historical data before enabling it.
    2. This ensures the alert behaves as expected.
  7. Enable Alert
    1. Switch ON the alert to activate it.
    2. You can also save it in a disabled state for future activation.
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Once created, alerts are listed on the Alert Configuration listing page. This page provides a centralized view of all configured alerts and also serves as the starting point for creating new alerts.

Each step gives you full control over what is evaluated, how notifications are generated, and how the alert behaves over time.

Accessing Alerts​

The Alert Configuration listing page allows users to view and manage all configured alert rules in one place. From this page, users can create new alerts, edit existing ones, enable or disable alerts, and remove alerts when they are no longer required. The listing also supports basic bulk actions, making it easier to manage multiple alerts efficiently.

vuSmartMaps Alerts can be accessed by navigating from the left navigation menu (**Observability Studios > Alert Configuration Studio).

On the Alert Configurations Studio page, you will see the list of all configured alert rules. The table includes:

  • Enable/Disable Toggle – Switch alerts on or off without deleting them.
  • Name - The name of an Alert Rule.
  • About - The description of the Alert Rule.
  • Modified By - The information on the user who modified the Alert Rule recently.
  • Modified At - The information on the date and time when an Alert Rule recently was modified.
  • Actions - Provides quick controls to edit an existing alert rule or delete it permanently from the system.

FAQs​

What is Alert Configuration Studio?

Alert Configuration Studio is the centralized interface in vuSmartMaps used to create, configure, test, and manage alert rules using the NG Alert Engine.

How many steps are involved in creating an alert rule?

Alert rules are created using a guided seven-step workflow:

  • Basic Details
  • Alert Evaluation Conditions
  • Generate Content for the Alert
  • Alert Notification Channels
  • Additional Controls
  • Test Execution
  • Enable Alert
Can I create multiple alert rules?

Yes. You can create any number of alert rules. Each rule is evaluated independently based on its configured schedule and evaluation logic.