Alarm Language - Generic Thresholds Made Easy

Forget cumbersome editing of config files on a Nagios server.

Rackspace Cloud Monitoring lets you:

• Set thresholds with an easy to use alarm language:

  if (metrics['code'] != "200") {
    return CRITICAL, "Bad HTTP Status: #{code}"
  }

• Create expressive alarms that validate multiple criteria while maintaining an easy to use javascript-like interface:

  if (metric['duration'] > 2000) {
    return CRITICAL, "HTTP request took more than 2 seconds, it took #{duration} milliseconds."
  } 
  if (metric['duration'] > 1000) { 
    return WARNING, "HTTP request took more than 1 second, it took #{duration} milliseconds."
  } 
  # Check for an empty body match
  if (metric['body_match'] == "") {
    return CRITICAL, "Body match missing" 
  } 
  return OK, "HTTP connection time is normal"

• See the solution patterns in our best practices documentation and then easily create your own complex alarms.
• Our API makes it simple to keep up-to-date on these examples, get more information here.
• Put developers in control, letting them build thresholds similar to how you create your application code.
• Test thresholds before you configure them. Use data from our Test Check API and feed that into our Test Alarm API to simulate an alerting scenario.
• Use multi-datacenter alerting policies to seamlessly evaluate alarm criteria from multiple datacenters:

The graph above shows a check running in 3 monitoring zones. The yellow and red areas represent when an alarm is in WARNING and CRITICAL respectively.

Key Takeaways

• Don't run a DIY nagios server.
• Start monitoring faster and spend less sysadmin time on making sure that server stays up.
• Reduce false alerts on network hiccups.
• Monitor your website from up to 5 different locations. Set the policy you’d like to execute on mixed results.
• Send an alert to different notification addresses depending on severity.
• Supports dual stacks, both IPv4 and IPv6.
• Our flexible alerting language puts you in control, don’t bother with an awkward JSON API for defining thresholds.