Notifications make monitoring useful.
Without proper alerting, even the best monitoring setup is just pretty dashboards that nobody looks at until it’s too late.
Passive Monitoring Integration#
When looking at it from a passive monitoring perspective using Prometheus, AlertManager is a great service to leverage as it can hook into:
- Slack - Instant team notifications
- PagerDuty - Escalation and on-call management
- SMS - Critical alerts that need immediate attention
- Email - Non-urgent notifications and reports
Application Performance Monitoring#
Other times you may want to know about business events:
- When a client registers on your SaaS product
- When a client is attempting to leave
- When specific business thresholds are met
Real-World Example: Trading Bot Alerts#
In my trading bot implementation:
Trade Execution Alerts:
- ✅ Whenever the bot executes a trade → Slack message
- ⚠️ When a stop-loss is invoked → Slack message
- 🚨 If an error occurs during trade execution → Slack message
Benefits:
- Remote Management: Restart services if necessary without SSH access
- Peace of Mind: Enjoy your day without constantly checking dashboards
- Immediate Response: Know about issues as they happen, not hours later
- Context: Get actionable information, not just “something broke”
Smart Alerting Strategy#
What TO Alert On#
- Critical System Issues: Service down, high error rates
- Business Events: Revenue-impacting events, user actions
- Performance Degradation: Response time increases, resource exhaustion
- Security Events: Failed authentications, unusual access patterns
What NOT to Alert On#
- Noise: Temporary blips that self-resolve
- Non-actionable: Metrics you can’t do anything about
- Over-alerting: So many alerts that you ignore them all
Implementation Results#
This approach allows me to:
- Avoid SSH sessions while out and about
- Skip opening Kibana or other monitoring tools constantly
- Respond quickly to actual issues
- Maintain work-life balance without sacrificing system reliability
Key insight: The goal isn’t to get more notifications—it’s to get the right notifications at the right time so you can take meaningful action.