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Configure Alert Rules

Alert rules connect incoming monitoring alerts to the correct on-call team.

When an alert fires, AI SRE evaluates your rules to determine whether to page a responder and which escalation policy to use.

Create an Alert Rule​

  1. Navigate to On-Call → Alert Rules.
  2. Click Create Alert Rule.
  3. Configure the rule:
    • Name — A descriptive name (e.g., "Payments Alerts → Payments On-Call").
    • Service — Select the service this rule applies to. The service list is populated from the service directory.
    • Paging toggle — Enable to automatically page the on-call responder when this rule matches. Disable to log the alert without paging.
    • Escalation policy — Select which escalation policy to invoke when this rule triggers.
  4. Click Save.

How Alert Routing Works​

  1. An alert arrives from a monitoring integration (Datadog, New Relic, Grafana, etc.).
  2. AI SRE extracts the impacted service from the alert payload.
  3. The system evaluates your alert rules to find a matching service.
  4. If the matching rule has paging enabled, the escalation policy is invoked, which identifies the current on-call responder and sends notifications.

If no alert rule matches the incoming service, the alert is logged but no page is triggered.

Configure Default and Impacted Services​

Each alert rule can be configured with:

  • Default service — The service assumed if the alert payload doesn't include a service identifier.
  • Impacted service — Extracted automatically from the alert payload when available, overriding the default.

This lets you handle both well-structured alert payloads and those that lack service metadata.

Best Practices​

  • Create specific rules per service — Broad, catch-all rules risk paging the wrong team. Map each production service to its own alert rule.
  • Be deliberate with the paging toggle — Not every alert should wake someone up. Enable paging only for alerts that require immediate human attention. Use the toggle to suppress paging for informational or low-severity alerts.
  • Align rules with your service directory — Alert rules rely on service mappings. If a service isn't in the directory or is mapped to the wrong team, routing will fail silently.
  • Test end-to-end — Send a test alert from your monitoring tool and verify that it matches the correct rule, pages the right person, and uses the expected escalation policy.
  • Review rules regularly — As services are added, renamed, or retired, update your alert rules to stay in sync.