Using Alerts

Alerts are useful in forewarning you of potential problems before they become a more serious issue. Alerts use AI and machine learning to uncover where your service struggles most often and offers immediate troubleshooting capabilities. There are two main sections where you can work with alerts, the Overview page and the Alerts Manager. Both can be accessed through the Alerts section in the Tools section of the sidebar. 

Contents

Accessing the Alerts Section

• Click Alerts in the sidebar under the Tools section.
  
  

Overview Page

The Overview dashboard always displays the same four widgets:

• Concurrent Plays: Shows the evolution of your total concurrent plays over the last 24 hours.
• Alerts over last 7 days: Shows how many of each alert you have had over the past 5 days. There are five different alert levels from Trivial to Critical.
• Open Alerts: Shows how many open alerts you have and how many are at each level of criticality.
• Open/Closed Alerts Manager: Shows a more detailed breakdown of all of your open and closed alerts, including alert name, flow name, status, priority, opened at, opened for and description.
  

Creating a New Alert

To create a new alert:

1. Click Alerts in the sidebar and select Alert Manager.
2. Click the Create New Alert button in the top-right corner.
   
   
   
   
3. Enter the Name, Description and Metric to track.
4. Click Create. The Flow editor opens.
   
   

Using the Drag and Drop Flow Editor

Once an alert is created, a flow can be built from it to track metrics. Flows are built using cards and cards can be placed anywhere on the editor interface and linked to each other manually by dragging a line from the plus  icon on the right-side of each card to the relevant icon on the left side of another card. The functionality of a card can be configured by clicking the tool icon at the top-right of the card.

• Green cards: Indicate the metric for which you are setting the alert. 
• Red cards: Indicate the Static (configured manually using levels of criticality, thresholds and deep filtering) or Smart alerts (intelligent anomaly detector capable of detecting irregular platform behavior based on historical data). The name of these cards can be changed by double-clicking it. 
• Blue cards: Indicate the notification channels.  
  
  

Multiple static alerts can be attached to a single metric, but only one Smart alert can be used in a flow. Once a card is connected to its correct counterpart in the flow, the bottom of the card displays Connected.

You can Edit, Save, and Delete the alert using the icons in the top-right corner above the flow editor.

Smart Alerts

Smart Alerts allow you to set thresholds for when an alert should be issued and specify the alert delivery methods. 

Configuring Smart Alerts

The anomaly detector reads real-time data during streaming and determines whether these events are anomalous and warrant a root cause analysis.

To configure Smart Alerts:

1. Enter the alert flow editor.
2. Drag and drop a Smart Alert onto the flow editor area.
   
   
   
   
3. Click the Edit  icon. The configuration pane opens.
   
   
   
   
4. Click the Type drop-down menu and select ALL, VOD, or LIVE.
5. Select how you would like alerts to be grouped. For example, by location or protocol.
6. When you configured the Smart Alert, click Save.

Configuring this card gives you the option to filter the content you are creating an alert for using dimensions and video type (VOD, Live). Choose which categories you wish to group by and the anomaly detector finds areas at fault.

Static Alerts

Static Alerts are useful to inform you of the performance of particular metrics and to issue alerts at specified thresholds.

Configuring Static Alerts

To configure a Static Alert:

1. Enter the Alert Flow editor.
2. Drag and drop a Static Alert onto the flow editor area.
   
   
   
   
3. Hover over the alert and click the Edit icon at the top-right corner of the card. The Alert editor is displayed. The graph on the right shows different figures depending on the configuration parameters that you enter.
   
   
   
   
4. Click Add Filter  to select the filter that is to be applied to the alert.
5. Click Add Group  to configure alerts for any option within a dimension.
6. Click Type  to specify whether these conditions applied to LIVE or VOD events.
7. Next, click Add Threshold  to add up to five threshold levels for the alert notifications.
8. Click Priority  to set the criticality for the threshold of the alert.
9. Click Check Type to specify whether it is above or below when values should be checked.
10. Click Value   to provide a value against which the threshold should be checked.
11. Click Duration (min)  to indicate the amount of time at the threshold that should occur before the alert should be sent.
12. When you are done configuring, click Save . Use the icons at the top right corner of the card to Clone or Delete the Alert.