A condition describes a monitored data source and the behavior of that data source that will be considered an incident. This document will explain the types of conditions available, how to create a condition, and how to view existing conditions.
Anomaly alerting allows you to create conditions that dynamically adjust to changing data and trends, such as weekly or seasonal patterns. This feature is available for and apps, as well as NRQL queries.
You can set thresholds that open an incident when they are breached by any of your Java app's instance metrics.
By scoping thresholds to specific instances, you can more quickly identify where potential problems are originating. This is useful, for example, to detect anomalies that are occurring only in a subset of your app's instances. These sorts of anomalies are easy to miss for apps that aggregate metrics across a large number of instances.
For Java apps monitored by APM, you can set thresholds that open an incident when the heap size or number of threads for a single JVM is out of the expected operating range.
We evaluate alerting threshold breaches individually for each of the app's selected instances. When creating your condition, select JVM health metric as the type of condition for your Java app's alert policy, then select any of the available thresholds:
Deadlocked threads
Heap memory usage
CPU utilization time
Garbage collection CPU time
Incidents will automatically close when the inverse of the threshold is met, but by using the UI you can also change the time when an incident force-closes for a JVM health metric. Default is 24 hours.
We include the option to define a percentile as the threshold for your condition when your web app's response time is above, below, or equal to this value. This is useful, for example, when Operations personnel want to alert on a percentile for an app server's overallweb transaction response time rather than the average web response time.
Select Web transactions percentiles as the type of condition for your app's condition, then select a single app. (To alert on more than one app, create an individual Web transactions percentiles condition for each.)
To define the thresholds that open the incident, type the Percentile nth response time value, then select its frequency (above, below, or equal to this value).
We store the transaction time in milliseconds, although the user interface shows the Critical and Warning values as seconds. If you want to define milliseconds, be sure to include the decimal point in your value.
By applying labels to applications, you can automatically link these entities to your condition. This makes it easy to manage all the applications within a dynamic environment. We recommend using the agent configuration file to best maintain entity labels.
A single label identifies all entities associated with that label (maximum 10,000 entities). Multiple labels only identify entities which share all the selected labels.
Using dynamic targeting with your condition also requires that you set an incident close timer.
To add, edit, or remove up to ten labels for a condition:
Select APM > Application metric as the product type.
When identifying entities, select the Labels tab. Search for a label by name, or select a label from the list of categories.
You can also create conditions directly within the context of what you are monitoring with Infrastructure.
For example, if you want to be notified when we have stopped receiving data from an infrastructure agent, use the host not reporting condition type. This allows you to dynamically alert on filtered groups of hosts and configure the time window from 5 to 60 minutes.
Apdex and response time conditions
You can open incidents and send notifications for response times. However, Apdex scores are almost always more meaningful and provide a better reflection of application performance. For example, average response times can be skewed by outliers, while the Apdex score gives a more accurate assessment of acceptable response time rates that your users experience.
Change a condition name
If you want to change the default condition name, make it short and descriptive. Provide useful information for notification messages that have limited characters, such as email subject lines, online chat, etc.
Click the ellipses menu (...) and click Edit to edit it, and then type a meaningful name for the condition.
You can't edit the product and condition type associated with a condition. Instead, you must delete the condition and create a new one with a different product and condition type.
Maintain policies and conditions
After you save the condition, the currently selected policy lists all alert conditions that apply to it. From here you can: