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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.
Downstream impact is currently determined based on table-level lineage.

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Matching modes and rule order

Elementary evaluates alert rules in one of two modes for each environment:
  • Ordered matching - Rules are checked from top to bottom. The first rule that matches sends the alert, and no further rules are checked. A rule only receives alerts that none of the rules above it matched.
  • Multi-rule matching - Every rule that matches sends the alert, so the order of the rules does not matter.
If the Alert Rules page shows a number and a drag handle next to each rule, your environment uses ordered matching.

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Changing the order of rules

In environments with ordered matching, you can change the priority of an alert rule at any time:
  1. Open the Alert Rules page.
  2. Drag the rule by its handle to a new position. Alternatively, open the rule’s actions menu and select Move up or Move down.
The number next to each rule shows its position. The new order is used the next time an alert is evaluated. Reordering requires permission to edit alert rules (see roles and permissions).
  • Put your most specific rules first. A broad rule near the top catches every alert it matches, so the rules below it never see those alerts.
  • The default rule, which sends all failures to the channel you connected, can be moved like any other rule. If you move it to the top, the rules below it will not receive alerts.
  • New rules are added at the bottom of the list.
  • Reordering applies to alert rules, not to digest rules.
You can also review and reorder alert rules with the Elementary MCP server, for example by asking your AI client to move one rule above another.

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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.