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 create a log-based alerting policy by using the Google Cloud CLI, you must also have the serviceusage.serviceUsageConsumer role.

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

Creating an example policy: API server unavailable

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

1. Download the policy configuration file: apiserver-unavailable.json.

2. 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.

3. View your alerting policies:

   Console

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

      Go to Monitoring

   2. On the left, select Alerting.

   3. Under Policies, you can see a list of your alerting policies.

      In the list, select Anthos 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
      Anthos cluster API server uptime is absent for 5m
      

   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
         - resource.label.pod_name
         perSeriesAligner: ALIGN_MAX
       duration: 300s
       filter: resource.type = "k8s_container" AND metric.type = "kubernetes.io/anthos/container/uptime"
         AND resource.label."container_name"=monitoring.regex.full_match("kube-apiserver")
       trigger:
         count: 1
     displayName: Anthos cluster API server uptime is absent for 5m
     name: projects/…/alertPolicies/…/conditions/…
   displayName: Anthos cluster API server unavailable (critical)
   enabled: true
   mutationRecord:
     mutateTime: …
     mutatedBy: …
   name: projects/…/alertPolicies/…
   

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:

1. Click the link in the right column to download the configuration file.

2. Optionally, tune the conditions to better fit your specific needs, for example, you can add additional filters for a subset of clusters, or adjust the threshold values to balance between noisiness and criticality.

3. Run gcloud alpha monitoring policies create to create the policy.

Control plane components availability

Kubernetes system

Kubernetes performance

Alert Policies with PromQL

The queries in alert policies can also be expressed in PromQL instead of MQL. For example, the PromQL version of the API server error ratio exceeds 20 percent (critical) policy is available to download: apiserver-error-ratio-high-promql.json.

For more information, refer to the Use Managed Service for Prometheus for Google Distributed Cloud documentation and the Alerting policies with PromQL for Cloud Monitoring documentation.

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.