Monitoring and Alerts

Monitoring your cloud resources is critical to ensure availability of the resources and be in a position to take proactive actions before failure scenarios occur. CoreStack helps in automatically configuring monitoring metrics in your cloud native monitoring mechanisms (such as Amazon CloudWatch, Azure Monitor) for all your resources. What's more, you will also get alerts from CoreStack when the set thresholds are exceeded.

This section handles the configurations associated with managing monitoring & alert rules for cloud resources.

CoreStack helps with automated configuration of alerts in your native cloud monitoring and issues alerts in scenarios where set threshold limits are exceeded for the associated cloud account. Let us take the example of CPU Utilization. You can set an alert stating that a CPU Utilization above a threshold limit of say, 90%, is to be flagged. This alert will be sent as an email to the configured mail addresses.

You can create alert rules for one or more specific resource activities with preferred threshold limits.

Navigation

Click on Operations in the Left navigation menu and select Monitoring & Alerts option to land in Monitoring Services – Alert Rules screen.

Creating a New Alert Rule

The following steps need to be performed to create a new alert rule.

Click on "Create Alerts" button.
Provide the following details to create the alert rule.

Field	Description
Cloud	Select required cloud provider from the Cloud dropdown list.
Resource Type	Select the type of resource in the Resource Type field for which the alert must be configured.
Resource	A list of resources will be populated in the Resource field based on the resource type selected. Select the required resource from the list.
Metric Name	Select the required metric for which the threshold limit must be configured in the Metric Name field. The metrics list is populated based on the resource selected.
Evaluation Period	This is the number of times within a set period that CoreStack will check for a threshold violation. For example, if this is set to 2, and the period is set to 30 minutes, then CoreStack will check the threshold every 30 mins. And if there is a threshold violation more than 2 times, then it will trigger an alert and notification to the user.
Period	The period, over which the specified statistic will be applied for aggregation.
Comparison Operator	Operator set in this field will be used to compare the statistic with the set threshold. Options available are: Greater than (>), Greater than or equal (>=), Lesser than or equal (<=), and Lesser than (<).
Statistic	There are four data aggregation options available in the dropdown – Average, Minimum, Maximum, and Sum. This section determines how the actual value should be compared with the threshold. For example, you can define if the average monthly CPU utilization be compared to the threshold or the maximum value hit at a specific time be compared to the threshold.
Threshold	This is where the numerical value can be provided. Specify the acceptable limit that needs to be validated for initiating the alert in this field.

Click on Save Configuration button to create the alert rule.

A new alert rule will be created and listed in the Monitoring Services – Alert Rules screen. The alert rule will be configured with the specified threshold value and validation mechanism. But the created alert rule will not be associated with any cloud account and it must be configured.

To map the cloud accounts while creating the alert rule, click on "Add Accounts" button instead of "Click on Save Configuration" button.

Mapping Cloud Accounts with an Alert Rule

To configure cloud accounts that are associated with the alert rule, perform the following steps.

Select the required cloud accounts from the Cloud Accounts dropdown list. The list is populated based on the cloud accounts already onboarded in CoreStack.
Select a notification mechanism for the alert rule in the External Notification section: Email, Webhook, None.
Specify the email addresses or webhook URL in the text field.
Tick the Apply to existing resources checkbox to enable the new alert rule active for the existing resources as well in the cloud accounts.
Click Save & Complete button to create the alert rule.

The selected cloud accounts will be mapped with the alert rule.

Managing Existing Alerts

You can manage the alerts by using the below explained options provided.

By clicking on the "Add Account" link available in the Action column of the list, you can add cloud accounts for alert rules that do not have any mapped cloud accounts.
The alert rule can be enabled or disabled by toggling the On/Off button in the Status column of the list.
Select the hamburger button (three horizontal bars) and enable or disable the columns to display or hide them for viewing in the table.

Viewing Monitoring Alerts

You can view the monitoring alerts in the following places:

Receive email alerts when the specified thresholds are exceeded
Receive alerts on other applications configured using the webhook option under notification
Operations Posture Dashboard lists the monitoring alerts that were activated and unresolved within the last 24 hours. You can view these at Tenant or Cloud Account level and drill down further to view more details
Reports option in the Left navigation menu has the following reports in the Monitoring Analytics section. These reports provide a view of all monitoring alerts that happened in your cloud accounts for any selected time period. You can further slice and dice the data presented in these analytics reports and export as CSV file if required.
1. AWS Monitoring Alerts
2. Azure Monitoring Alerts
3. Multi-Cloud Monitoring Alerts