Over the past few years, myself and others have encouraged everyone to tune alerts in order to make them meaningful. The goal being to eliminate false alerts, and to encourage action on legitimate alerts. Once Alerts are tuned, then notifications become powerful.
As I attempted to do this in my own ArcGIS Monitor (AGM), I instantly became overwhelmed by the number of alerts I had. It was a real challenge to even identify how frequently the alerts were repeated over the course of 7 days. I needed a way to aggregate the alerts in order to identify and prioritize which alerts needed tuning. I came up with the following workflow that I wanted to share. It should be noted that something similar could probably be done in an analysis view, but for me, having the data in an excel sheet where I can mark it up with notes and colors will help me stay on task and actually tune the alerts. So here goes.
- Begin By logging into your AGM server. > Launch pgadmin4 > browse to the agm database > views > alerts_view
- This is the view that runs the Alerts Tab in AGM
- With the context I laid out, I wanted to narrow down the alerts for the past 7 days and I specifically want to look at the alerts pertaining to services.
- Launch the Query Tool and type the following query:
- SELECT * FROM public.alerts_view
Where opened_at >= NOW() - INTERVAL '7 days' and component_type = 'service'; - The data will appear in the data output section
- In the data output section click the "save results to file" button. this will download the results as a csv.
- open the csv as an excel file.
- Create a pivot table:
- rows: component name, metric name;
- Values count: id (make sure you switch it to count, it was initially sum for me)
- This will give you the number of times a service had an alert, and which type of alert for the past 7 days.
- From here you can look for outliers that have a large number of alerts
- Then go to the Monitor Tab > Select Service > copy and paste the service name into the search bar
- Select the Service, and now you can sift through the metrics and adjust the alert thresholds.
- You can also mark up your excel sheet and take notes on the changes you make as you go.
I just wanted to share this workflow in case it helped with turning alerts. Now get out your wrenches and happy tuning. Thank you for everything and have a delightful day.
Sincerely,
Joe Guzi
