Datadog’s New “Composite Alerts” Feature Dramatically Reduces Alert Noise for DevOps Teams | Datadog

Datadog’s New “Composite Alerts” Feature Dramatically Reduces Alert Noise for DevOps Teams

March 14, 2017

5:00 PM UTC

Published by Business Wire

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NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Datadog, the essential monitoring service for modern cloud environments, today introduced “Composite Alerts” to its platform, enabling DevOps teams to dramatically reduce time spent managing insignificant alerts. Composite Alerts work by allowing customers to create customizable combinations of symptoms that often cause major outages, separating signal from noise and accurately identifying major issues within infrastructure and applications.

“We’re thinking more intently about how teams can leverage all of the data we provide to set more useful and meaningful alerts,” said Steve Boak, Senior Product Designer at Datadog. “IT operations often has a ‘better safe than sorry’ mentality, which can lead to noise and unnecessary false alarms. Being able to fine tune very specific conditions will not only reduce this noise, but escalate potentially disastrous issues as efficiently as possible.”

Traditional alerting is based on singular thresholds for isolated metrics or events, often representing only a symptom of a potentially larger problem. A large portion of these alerts can be inconsequential, requiring intensive manual labor to determine if there is reason for serious concern. With Composite Alerts, DevOps teams can avoid unnecessary alerts by constraining the conditions that cause an alert to fire in the first place.

Composite Alerts can be set for any combination of performance indicators and can add critical nuance to alerting conditions. For instance, an alert may be necessary when the message queues grow too long, but not when a service restarts which can cause temporary queue growth and trigger false alarms. In this case, a Composite Alert can be created that triggers only when queue length crosses a threshold and the uptime for the service is greater than 10 minutes. Teams can then disable notifications from the original singular alert to reduce the total number of alerts they receive, which is especially useful for running distributed applications and microservices where myriad services are interdependent.

This is top of mind for Segment, the analytics API and customer data platform. “Our team needs to understand the difference between a minor concern and something that needs all hands on deck,” said Co-Founder Calvin French-Owen. “Datadog’s robust alerting capabilities are crucial for the operations team here at Segment.”

Composite alerts are available immediately for all Datadog customers. The company also recently announced Datadog APM, extending visibility for DevOps teams beyond the infrastructure and into the code-level for service-oriented applications.

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About Datadog

Datadog is the world’s leading monitoring service for cloud-scale applications, bringing together data from servers, databases, tools, and services to present a unified view of your entire stack. These capabilities are provided on a SaaS-based data analytics platform that enables Dev and Ops teams to work collaboratively to avoid downtime, resolve performance problems, and ensure that development and deployment cycles finish on time. Since launching in 2010, Datadog has been adopted by thousands of enterprises including Airbnb, Atlassian, Netflix, PagerDuty, Salesforce, Twilio, Warner Bros, and Zendesk.