Version 1.12. This version is no longer supported. For more information see the version support policy.

Creating alerting policies

This page shows how to create alerting policies for Google Distributed Cloud clusters.

Before you begin

You must have the following permissions to create alerting policies:

monitoring.alertPolicies.create
monitoring.alertPolicies.delete
monitoring.alertPolicies.update

You'll have these permissions if you have any one of the following roles:

monitoring.alertPolicyEditor
monitoring.editor
Project editor
Project owner

To check your roles, go to the IAM page in the Google Cloud console.

Creating a policy: admin cluster API server unavailable

In this exercise, you create an alerting policy for Kubernetes API servers of admin clusters. With this policy in place, you can arrange to be notified whenever the API server of an admin cluster is unavailable.

Download the policy configuration file: admin-cluster-apiserver-unavailable.json.
Create the policy:
```
gcloud alpha monitoring policies create --policy-from-file=POLICY_CONFIG
```
Replace POLICY_CONFIG with the path of the configuration file you just downloaded.

View your alerting policies:

Console

In the Google Cloud console, go to the Monitoring page.

Go to Monitoring
On the left, select Alerting.
Under Policies, you can see a list of your alerting policies.

In the list, select GKE on-prem admin cluster API server unavailable (critical) to see details about your new policy. Under Conditions, you can see a description of the policy. For example:
```
Policy violates when ANY condition is met

GKE on-prem admin cluster API server uptime is absent

GKE on-prem admin cluster API server uptime is less than 99.99% per minute
```

gcloud

gcloud alpha monitoring policies list

The output shows detailed information about the policy. For example:

combiner: OR
conditions:
- conditionAbsent:
    aggregations:
    - alignmentPeriod: 60s
      crossSeriesReducer: REDUCE_MEAN
      groupByFields:
      - resource.label.project_id
      - resource.label.location
      - resource.label.cluster_name
      - resource.label.namespace_name
      - resource.label.container_name
      perSeriesAligner: ALIGN_MAX
    duration: 300s
    filter: resource.type = "k8s_container" AND resource.labels.namespace_name = "kube-system"
      AND metric.type = "kubernetes.io/anthos/container/uptime" AND resource.label."container_name"=monitoring.regex.full_match("kube-apiserver")
    trigger:
      count: 1
  displayName: GKE on-prem admin cluster API server uptime is absent
  name: projects/…/alertPolicies/17065318077071152828/conditions/17065318077071154437
- conditionThreshold:
    aggregations:
    - alignmentPeriod: 120s
      crossSeriesReducer: REDUCE_MEAN
      groupByFields:
      - resource.label.project_id
      - resource.label.location
      - resource.label.cluster_name
      - resource.label.namespace_name
      - resource.label.container_name
      perSeriesAligner: ALIGN_MAX
    comparison: COMPARISON_LT
    duration: 300s
    filter: resource.type = "k8s_container" AND resource.labels.namespace_name = "kube-system"
      AND metric.type = "kubernetes.io/anthos/container/uptime" AND resource.label."container_name"=monitoring.regex.full_match("kube-apiserver")
    thresholdValue: 119.0
    trigger:
      count: 1
  displayName: GKE on-prem admin cluster API server uptime is less than 99.99% per
    minute
  name: projects/…/alertPolicies/17065318077071152828/conditions/17065318077071151950
creationRecord:
  mutateTime: …
  mutatedBy: …
displayName: GKE on-prem admin cluster API server unavailable (critical)
enabled: true
mutationRecord:
  mutateTime: …
  mutatedBy: …
name: projects/xxxxxx/alertPolicies/17065318077071152828

Creating additional alerting policies

This section provides descriptions and configuration files for a set of recommended alerting policies.

To create a policy, follow the same steps that you used in the preceding exercise:

Click the link in the right column to download the configuration file.
Run gcloud alpha monitoring policies create to create the policy.

Admin cluster control plane components availability

Alert name	Description	Alerting policy definition in Cloud Monitoring
GKE on-prem admin cluster API server unavailable (critical)	Admin cluster API server is not up or uptime is less than 99.99% per minute	admin-cluster-apiserver-unavailable.json
GKE on-prem admin cluster scheduler unavailable (critical)	Admin cluster scheduler is not up or uptime is less than 99.99% per minute	admin-cluster-scheduler-unavailable.json
GKE on-prem admin cluster controller manager unavailable (critical)	Admin cluster controller manager is not up or uptime is less than 99.99% per minute	admin-cluster-controller-manager-unavailable.json
GKE on-prem admin cluster etcd unavailable (critical)	Admin cluster etcd is not up or uptime is less than 99.99% per minute	admin-cluster-etcd-unavailable.json

User cluster control plane components availability

The user cluster control plane alerts are based on metrics. For most cluster metrics, the cluster_name field is the name of the cluster itself. But for user cluster control plane metrics, the cluster_name field is the name of the admin cluster, and the namespace_name field is the name of the user cluster.

You can see this in a screenshot under Create a control plane uptime dashboard.

Alert name	Description	Alerting policy definition in Cloud Monitoring
GKE on-prem user cluster API server unavailable (critical)	User cluster API server is not up or uptime is less than 99.99% per minute	user-cluster-apiserver-unavailable.json
GKE on-prem user cluster scheduler unavailable (critical)	User cluster scheduler is not up or uptime is less than 99.99% per minute	user-cluster-scheduler-unavailable.json
GKE on-prem user cluster controller manager unavailable (critical)	User cluster controller manager is not up or uptime is less than 99.99% per minute	user-cluster-controller-manager-unavailable.json
GKE on-prem user cluster etcd unavailable (critical)	User cluster etcd is not up or uptime is less than 99.99% per minute	user-cluster-etcd-unavailable.json

Kubernetes system

Alert name	Description	Alerting policy definition in Cloud Monitoring
GKE on-prem pod crash looping (critical)	Pod is in a crash loop status	pod-crash-looping.json
GKE on-prem pod not ready for more than one hour (critical)	Pod is in a non-ready state for more than one hour	pod-not-ready-1h.json
GKE on-prem persistent volume high usage (critical)	Persistent volume claimed is expected to fill up	persistent-volume-usage-high.json
GKE on-prem node not ready for more than one hour (critical)	Node is in a non-ready state for more than one hour	node-not-ready-1h.json

Kubernetes performance

Alert name	Description	Alerting policy definition in Cloud Monitoring
GKE on-prem admin cluster API server error count ratio exceeds 10 percent (critical)	Admin cluster API server is returning errors for more than 10% of requests	admin-cluster-apiserver-error-ratio-10-percent.json
GKE on-prem admin cluster API server error count ratio exceeds 5 percent (warning)	Admin cluster API server is returning errors for more than 5% of requests	admin-cluster-apiserver-error-ratio-5-percent.json
GKE on-prem user cluster API server error count ratio exceeds 10 percent (critical)	User cluster API server is returning errors for more than 10% of requests	user-cluster-apiserver-error-ratio-10-percent.json
GKE on-prem user cluster API server error count ratio exceeds 5 percent (warning)	User cluster API server is returning errors for more than 5% of requests	user-cluster-apiserver-error-ratio-5-percent.json

Getting notified

After you create an alerting policy, you can define one or more notification channels for the policy. There are several kinds of notification channels. For example, you could be notified by email, a Slack channel, or a mobile app. You can choose the channels that suit your needs.

For instructions about how to configure notification channels, see Managing notification channels.