Alert Rules

Alert Rules help you control where alerts are sent and when they are triggered, so you can stay focused on the incidents that matter most. In Elementary Cloud, each rule combines filters (what to alert on) and destinations (where to send the alert).

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Destinations: Where Alerts Are Sent

A destination defines where an alert notification will be delivered. You can route alerts to messaging apps (like Slack or Microsoft Teams) or incident management tools (like PagerDuty or Opsgenie). For all supported tools, you can also specify the exact channel, team, or escalation path for the alert. Each alert can be routed to one or multiple destinations — within the same tool or across different tools.

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Filters: What Triggers an Alert

Filters define which alerts are routed through a rule. They help you fine-tune alerting, reduce noise, and focus on critical issues. You can filter by:

• Assets — Filter alerts based on model name, owner, tag, or status.
• Test Types — Filter by the type of test that triggered the alert, such as volume anomalies, freshness anomalies, model errors, or dbt tests.
• Downstream Impacted Assets — Filter alerts based on the downstream impact of an incident. Trigger alerts only when specific downstream assets are affected. You can filter impacted assets by:
  • Criticality — Only alert if critical assets are impacted.
  • Tags — Filter assets by tag.
  • Owners — Filter assets by owner.
  • Asset Type — Model, source, seed, snapshot, or exposure.

This helps ensure that alerts are only triggered when truly important assets are impacted, reducing alert fatigue and keeping your team focused.

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Rule order matters

The order of your rules is important. Here’s how it works:

• When an alert is generated, it’s evaluated in order, from top to bottom.
• As soon as a rule matches, the alert is routed to that rule’s destination.
• No further rules are checked after the first match.

If you want alerts to be routed based on all applicable rules (not just the first match), we’re testing a Beta feature that enables this. Reach out if you’d like early access!

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Alert rules default configuration

• The channel you choose when connecting your messaging app (Slack, Microsoft Teams, etc.) is automatically added as a default alert rule, that sends all the failures to that channel without any filtering.
• By default, warnings do not send alerts.

To modify, deactivate or add more rules, simply navigate to the Alert Rules page in the menu.