AppSignal helps you separate signal from noise. Today, we're launching a new notification setting that will help you get the right notifications at the right time.
Nth Error per Hour/Day
You can now configure AppSignal to notify you for every Nth error per hour or day. For example, you could configure two different errors like this:
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Billing Error: every 10th time a day
Imagine you have a billing error that occurs now and then, outside of your control. You've seen it happen a maximum of 5 times a day over the previous months, and you would like to know when this suddenly increases. Setting it to “every 10th time a day” will send you an alert for the 10th, 20th, 30th, … occurrence.
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API Error: every 1000th time an hour
You might have an API that is used by many people. When experimenting with an API, it is common to make mistakes that will then trigger errors. You might prefer to not be alerted for each one of these errors, and instead, only be alerted when the number of errors reaches a certain threshold — which might be an indicator of another issue unrelated to the errors occurring from normal use. You could, for instance, set it to notify you every 1000th time an hour, which might be an indicator that the API is failing for different reasons.
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During Incidents
Imagine something is severely broken. Hundreds of errors an hour are happening, but you're on top of it. It might not be a good idea to completely ignore all alerts, but getting each one of them will drown you in notifications. This is a perfect moment to manage the number of notifications coming in by temporarily setting your errors to Nth/hour.
Visualizing Errors in AppSignal
To give you an idea of how this works, we've made a small visualization of when you would receive alerts. In this scenario, we're setting the settings to “Every 100th per hour”.
- The red area signifies the errors in a specific hour.
- We'll send you an alert when it crosses the 100th, 200th, or 300th line.
- Every hour, the count is reset to zero.
- In this example, you'd receive a total of 5 alerts.
Recapping All Options
Let's recap all the options currently available for receiving alerts on an error.
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Never Notify (Noise level: 0)
If you want us to keep tracking an alert, but never receive any notifications, this one is for you. We'll keep processing all the errors for you to inspect, but will never notify you.
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First After Close (Noise level: 1)
Similar to first after deploy (explained below), we'll send you an alert if the error occurs again after you've closed it. If you fixed it without deploying (like SSH-ing to a server and fixing something in the database), but want to know if it happens again, this option will notify you.
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First After Deploy (Noise level: 2)
We'll send you a notification if the error happens again after a new deployment. This is useful if you think a new version of your code will fix the error: if it did not, we'll send you an alert. If it stays silent, you successfully squashed a bug.
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Every Nth per Hour/Day (Noise level: 1-10)
As shown earlier, we can notify you every Nth time an error happens per hour or day. You can set this to be as quiet or noisy as you want!
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Every Error (Noise level: 11)
We'll send you a notification every single time an error occurs. This is not for the faint of heart but could be useful for errors that are critical to your system's performance.
Notifications on Patterns? Set Error Rate Alerts!
Sometimes, you want to focus on patterns instead of individual errors. With our Anomaly Detection feature, you can set alerts on alert counts and error rates. For example, you can set an alert if your error % in the billing namespace is > 1%.
This Feature Was Brought to You by Customer Feedback
This is a feature that was repeatedly requested by our customers. If you have any ideas on how to improve AppSignal or are wondering if we cover your use case, feel free to reach out!
If you still haven't set up your AppSignal account, you can sign up, then reach out to our support and ask for a free box of delicious Dutch sweets! 🍪
