Setting Up Triggers and Alerts From Graphs in AppSignal

Building reliable applications and meeting the expectations of your users is not an easy task. Every now and then, a tiny bug can creep up into your production code and cause some trouble to your users. On some days, external API hick-ups may cause difficulties in keeping your application working smoothly.

This is where AppSignal comes in. As a 5-in-1 monitoring tool, it can detect anomalies in your app's behavior and send you a warning message. In this post, we'll go through the changes we've made in our interface that help you set up triggers and alerting for your application more easily.

Creating a Trigger From Custom Metrics

Custom metrics and triggers are a match made in heaven. Like salt and pepper. Like gin and tonic. Like developers and mechanical keyboards... You get the idea 😀

Custom metrics are an amazing way to measure those specific details that indicate your application's health. By setting up triggers for these custom metrics, you get alerted when they go outside their healthy ranges.

Improvements: Quickly Creating Triggers

Creating triggers just became a whole lot faster. Each graph in your dashboard now has a "create trigger" link that helps you create a new trigger for one of the metrics in a graph.

The trigger button works on the graphs on your custom and magic dashboards. Here's a short video showing you the magic:

What to Create Metrics & Triggers For

Here are a few metrics that you could create a graph for on your dashboard and what trigger you could set:

Suggested metrics	What they indicate
Error rate & error count	Bits are hitting the fan.
Reponse times	Slow requests aren't good, performance is affected.
Throughput	High throughput = bad or unexpected, you might want to scale up your servers.
Throughput	Low throughput (0) might indicate that something isn't working.
Sidekiq queue lengths	Big queues indicate poor performance.
Sidekiq queue latency	This metric shows how long it takes for the latest job to be processed, the longer the worse.

You Deserve a Stroopwafel 🍪

Our mission is to make the lives of developers easier and enjoyable. That's why we offer AppSignal for free to amazing OSS projects and send out stroopwafels once you've set up AppSignal.

If you're an existing user, you've probably already received them, but since you've reached the end of this post, you deserve some more! Feel free to message our support, and they'll soon be on their way.