The way organizations process logs have changed over the past decade. From random files, scattered amongst a handful of virtual machines, to JSON documents effortlessly streamed into platforms. Metrics, too, have seen great strides, as providers expose detailed measurements of every aspect of their system. Traces, too, have become increasingly sophisticated and can now highlight even the most precise details about interactions between our services. But alerts have remained stationary.

Alerting has been a fundamental part of operations strategy for the past decade. An entire industry is built around delivering valuable, actionable alerts to engineers and customers as quickly as possible. We will explore what’s missing from your alerts and how Coralogix Flow Alerts solve a fundamental problem in the observability industry.

Cloud services were born at the beginning of 2000 with companies such as Salesforce and Amazon paving the way. Simple Queuing Service (SQS) was the first service to be launched by Amazon Web Services in November 2004. It was offered as a distributed queuing service and it is still one of the most popular services in AWS. By 2006 more and more services were added to the offering list.

Observable and secure platforms use three connected data sets: logs, metrics, and traces. Platforms can link these data to alerting systems to notify system administrators when an event requires intervention. There are nuances to setting up these alerts so the system is kept healthy and the system administrators are not chasing false positive alerts.