Alerting and Notifications

Uptrace supports 2 types of monitors: metric and error monitors.

Metric monitors allow to create alerts and receive notifications when metric values meet certain conditions.

Error monitors allow to receive notifications for certain errors (exceptions) and logs, for example, production logs with the ERROR severity level.

• Notification channels
• Monitoring metrics
  • Examples
• Monitoring spans and logs
  • Examples
• Monitoring errors
  • Error notifications
• Email notifications

Notification channels

You can create notification channels to receive notifications via email, Slack, Telegram, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, AlertManager, and webhooks. You can specify which notification channels to use when creating monitors.

To create a notification channel:

1. Go to the "Alerting" -> "Channels" tab.
2. Click on the "New channel" -> "Slack" to open a form.

Monitoring metrics

Uptrace allows to create alerts when the monitored metric value meets certain conditions, for example, you can create an alert when system_filesystem_usage metric exceeds 90%.

Examples

Here are some examples of metric monitors you can create to monitor OpenTelemetry host metric. This guide uses YAML syntax to define monitors, but usually you will create monitors using Uptrace UI.

To monitor CPU usage:

monitors:
  - name: CPU usage
    type: metric
    metrics:
      - system_cpu_load_average_15m as $load_avg_15m
      - system_cpu_time as $cpu_time
    query:
      - $load_avg_15m / uniq($cpu_time.cpu) as cpu_util
      - group by host_name
    column: cpu_util
    column_unit: utilization
    max_allowed_value: 3
    check_num_point: 10

To monitor filesystem usage:

monitors:
  - name: Filesystem usage
    type: metric
    metrics:
      - system_filesystem_usage as $fs_usage
    query:
      - $fs_usage{state='used'} / $fs_usage as fs_util
      - group by host_name, mountpoint
      - where mountpoint !~ "/snap"
    column: fs_util
    column_unit: utilization
    max_allowed_value: 0.9
    check_num_point: 3

To monitor number of disk pending operations:

monitors:
  - name: Disk pending operations
    type: metric
    metrics:
      - system_disk_pending_operations as $pending_ops
    query:
      - $pending_ops
      - group by host_name, device
    max_allowed_value: 100
    check_num_point: 10

To monitor network errors:

monitors:
  - name: Network errors
    type: metric
    metrics:
      - system_network_errors as $net_errors
    query:
      - $net_errors
      - group by host.name
    max_allowed_value: 0
    check_num_point: 3

Monitoring spans and logs

You can also monitor tracing data using the following system metrics created by Uptrace:

• uptrace_tracing_spans. Number of spans and their duration (excluding events and logs).
• uptrace_tracing_logs. Number of logs (excluding spans and events).
• uptrace_tracing_events. Number of events (excluding spans and logs).

You can use all available span attributes for filtering and grouping, for example, where _status_code = 'error' or group by host_name.

Examples

To monitor average PostgreSQL SELECT query duration:

monitors:
  - name: PostgreSQL SELECT duration
    type: metric
    metrics:
      - uptrace_tracing_spans as $spans
    query:
      - avg($spans)
      - where _system = 'db:postgresql'
      - where db_operation = 'SELECT'
    max_allowed_value: 10000 # 10 milliseconds
    check_num_point: 5

To monitor median duration of all database operations:

monitors:
  - name: Database operations duration
    type: metric
    metrics:
      - uptrace_tracing_spans as $spans
    query:
      - p50($spans)
      - where _type = 'db'
    max_allowed_value: 10000 # 10 milliseconds
    check_num_point: 5

To monitor number of errors:

monitors:
  - name: Number of errors
    type: metric
    metrics:
      - uptrace_tracing_logs as $logs
    query:
      - per_min(sum($logs))
      - where _system in ('log:error', 'log:fatal')
    max_allowed_value: 10
    check_num_point: 3

To monitor number of exceptions:

monitors:
  - name: Number of exceptions
    type: metric
    metrics:
      - uptrace_tracing_logs as $logs
    query:
      - per_min(sum($logs))
      - where _system = 'log:error'
      - where exception_type exists
    max_allowed_value: 10
    check_num_point: 3

Monitoring errors

Uptrace automatically creates alerts for exceptions and logs with log_severity levels ERROR, FATAL, and PANIC.

By default, Uptrace has an error monitor that sends email notification on all error alerts. You can create additional error monitors that will send notifications only for errors that match certain conditions, for example, errors with deployment_environment=prod and db_system=postgresql.

Error notifications

Because there can be millions of errors, Uptrace groups errors by message (error_message or log_message attributes) and only sends notifications in the following cases:

• When the error message is first seen.
• When the number of occurrences reaches 100, 1000, 10000, etc.
• After 24 hours from the last notification. In 3 days, the period is increased to 1 week.

Email notifications

To receive email notifications in the Uptrace Community version, make sure users have correct email addresses and the smtp_mailer is properly configured and enabled:

# uptrace.yml

auth:
  users:
    - name: John Smith
      email: john.smith@gmail.com
      password: uptrace
      notify_by_email: true

smtp_mailer:
  enabled: true
  host: smtp.gmail.com
  port: 587
  username: '[SENDER]@gmail.com'
  password: '[APP_PASSWORD]'
  from: '[SENDER]@gmail.com'

Note that Gmail does not allow to use your real password in smtp_mailer.password. Intead, you should generate an app password for Gmail:

1. In Gmail, click on your avatar -> "Manage your Google Account".
2. On the left, click on "Security".
3. Scroll to "Signing in to Google" and click on "App password".

See Gmail documentation for details.