Watchdog monitor

Overview

Watchdog is an algorithmic feature that automatically detects application and infrastructure issues, by continuously observing trends and patterns in application metrics—like error rate, request rate, and latency—and looking for unexpected behavior.

Watchdog monitors allow you to set up monitors and receive alert notifications when Watchdog detects a potential problem in your systems.

Creating a Watchdog Monitor

• Choose “Watchdog” on the New Monitor page.

• The graph at the top of the Create Monitor page shows the number of Watchdog events over time, along with a list of events.

• Select what type of story you want your monitor to be based on: Service or Infrastructure

• If you’ve chosen a Service story, select the sources you want to be alerted on.

• Configure your notification message. You can use template variables to customize your message.

Choosing the “Include triggering tags in notification title” option appends the service name, resource name, and primary tag (e.g. availability-zone) to the title.

• Configure the recipients of your notification.

Template variables in notifications

• {{event.id}}: ID of the event
• {{event.title}}: Title of the event, which also provides story details

Watchdog Alerts

Watchdog monitors appear in the Manage Monitors page, as well as in the Triggered Monitors page, when you filter for monitors with the type “Watchdog”.

Once you receive an alert, you can see more information about the underlying Watchdog story that triggered the alert by scrolling down the Triggered Monitors page to the events section and clicking on the details link.

Further Reading