Why should I set up an alerting system? Alerting gives timely awareness to problems in your cloud applications so you can resolve the problems quickly. To create an alerting policy, you must describe the circumstances under which you want to be alerted and how you want to be notified. This page provides an overview of alerting policies and the concepts behind them. Each alerting policy specifies the following: that identify when a resource or a group of resources is in a state that requires you to take action. The conditions for an alerting policy are continuously monitored. You cannot configure the conditions to be monitored only for certain time periods. Conditions that are sent to let your support team know when the conditions have been met. Notifications (optional) that can be included in some types of notifications to help your support team resolve the issue. Documentation source = Introduction to Alerting in Google Cloud Platform The alert system in the Rungutan platform has been created to assist you and your SRE team to fully understand the service level that your platform offers at any time. We do this by measuring the response times and failure rates of any and all your tests and deciding based on the thresholds that you have set up whether to send you an alert or not. This means that we have unlocked the following use cases for you and your team: - Combined with the fact that you can use your preferred CI/CD system (read ), you can now be alerted after each and every release if any performance optimisations problems have been introduced in either your code or your infrastructure changes Release Monitoring our article on CI/CD - Besides release testing, you can scheduled automated which act as scheduled tasks that run normal tests at specific intervals (eg Daily, Weekly, Monthly) Cron Monitoring Cron Jobs Types of alerts Failure Occurrences Percentage One of the alerts that you can set up on the Rungutan platform is related to the number of failures in your tests. As you may have seen on our platform should you have made a test and checked its results, there are a few graphs that show up for each and every step in your workflow. These are: Success Requests Per Second Failure Requests Per Second Success Response Times Failure Response Times Percentile - Success Response Times Percentile - Failure Response Times This specific alert relates to the number of requests that have failed out of the total number of requests simulated by your tests. Fun math time: Example -> total requests comprised successfull and failed percentage_failed -> (failed requests) / (total requests) * ( percentage) = % requests failed out total 2.000 of 1.5000 500 500 2000 100 as 25 of Since the value that you define when creating such an alert is the actual "approved" percentage value of failure requests, anything above that will trigger an alert! Max Success Response Time Milliseconds The other type of alert that you can set up on the Rungutan platform checks if the response time of your simulated tests are lower than the approved threshold that you have set up. It's not enough for your platform to withstand a huge amount of users! It should also provide a decent response time for them, in order to ensure not only that you meet the defined for your customers but also because companies literally lose money due to slow websites as users tend to simply close your web page if it loads too slowly. contractual SLAs This specific check measures if all the response times within your load test are smaller than the approved threshold that you have set up, and if they aren't, it promptly lets you know by sending an alert. Since the value that you define when creating such alert is the actual "approved" response time in milliseconds for any and all of your successful response times, anything above that will trigger an alert! Alerting channels Email One of the easiest ways to set up an incoming alert is by using the channel, which does exactly what it says -> it sends you an email with the alert name and the test that triggered it. EMAIL You can set up as many alerts with the same channel (but different types/values) as you need, based for instance on the impact of the value -> versus . warning critical Here's how an email alert looks like: Hello, One your tests recorded a percentage failure rate and triggered alert a threshold Use link to view the results -> https: This test was launched by member_email@domain.com against domain domain.com the following properties: * clients = * Client hatch rate = * Runtime = s * Test regions = [ap-northeast ] * Thread(s) per region = Warm regards, The Rungutan Team of 50 this with of 1. this //app.rungutan.com/results/?test_region=overall&test_id=${obfuscated_url} with Number of 10 10 10 -1 1 Slack is a proprietary business communication platform developed by American software company Slack Technologies. Slack offers many IRC-style features, including persistent chat rooms organised by topic, private groups, and direct messaging that was launched in August 2013. Slack Our integration with slack is based on , which are a simple way to post messages from apps into Slack. Creating an Incoming Webhook gives you a unique URL to which you send a JSON payload with the message text and some options. Incoming Webhooks Creating a Slack Incoming Webhook is simple and requires following these simple steps: Create a new Slack app using this URL -> by generating an app name and selecting the proper workspaceClick on under the section and activate it by clicking on the toggleClick on while in the Incoming Webhooks screen and then pick a channel and hit Copy the new URL by clicking the button and use it in our platform https://api.slack.com/apps/new Incoming Webhooks Features Add New Webhook to Workspace Allow Copy When all is done and ready, here's how an alert would look like: Final thoughts Automated alerts are essential for monitoring. They allow you to spot problems anywhere in your infrastructure, so that you can rapidly identify their causes and minimize service degradation and disruption. If metrics and other measurements facilitate observability, then alerts draw human attention to the particular systems that require observation, inspection, and intervention. If you need any help implementing this, we're more than welcome to assist you . through email Also, if you enjoyed this article, don't forget to Like and Subscribe to our YouTube channel -> . Rungutan Load Testing Previously published at https://rungutan.com/blog/load-testing-alerts/