Get notified of error rate anomalies on your website by setting up real time alerts. Real time error alerts monitor error rates every 5 minutes, so you can quickly act on anomalies and minimize the impact to your site.
How to set up a real time error alert
1. Go to 'Alerts' from the main menu.
2. Click 'Set up a new alert'.
3. Click 'Error alert', followed by 'Next step'.
4. Set your alert context, using the following configuration:
- Site: Monitor and receive error alerts impacting your entire site.
- Page group: Monitor and receive error alerts impacting a specific page group.
- Metric: Choose from one of the available real time error metrics and then select a type of error related to your metric (JS or API error).
- Device: Choose the device you wish to receive error alerts for.
- Segment: Select the segment that you wish to monitor.
5. Click 'Next step'
6. Click 'Manual alert', followed by 'Next step'
7. Select your Threshold type:
- % change limit: data will be monitored for a percentage increase, decrease, or both, depending on the limit you set.
- Fixed limit: Data will be monitored to see if it goes over or below the fixed limit you set, according to your selected time window. Learn more about selecting a time window below.
Defining the time window for fixed limit alerts
Real Time Alerts have an evaluation frequency of 5 minutes. This means that every 5 minutes we check if your data goes over your fixed threshold, or falls below it, within a selected time window. You can choose the time window that is being evaluated, when configuring the threshold of your real-time alert:
Choosing the right time window
Generally, smaller time windows tend to generate a higher number of notifications that highlight frequent fluctuations in your data, and can lead to false positives. Whereas larger time windows tend to result in fewer notifications, which highlight fluctuations in data accumulated over a longer period.
As a starter, a 30 minute time window is recommended to help reduce the amount of notifications and potential false positives.
To help illustrate this, see the example below of a count metric with windows of 5, 30 and 60 minutes and the 95th percentile of all the data points as a fixed threshold. The graph shows how the curve smoothens for larger windows, making it less frequent for the curve to reach the fixed limit.
8. Enter your trigger threshold: Get help from the recommendations provided based on your current data.
9. Click 'Next step' and choose how you wish to be notified:
- Email: notifications are sent from “Contentsquare” <noreply@contentsquare.com>
- Slack: (Visit our Slack integration article to learn more).
10. Click 'Next step' and review your alert summary
11. Click 'Create' to save your alert.
Your alert will be saved and available to review and/or edit from the Alerts area.
Create a real time error alert from a real time workspace
You can create real time error alerts directly from your real time error workspace.
1. Right-click on the more options menu '...' from a single value widget and click 'Create an alert'
2. Right-click on your line chart widget and click 'Create an alert'
Notification frequency and grouping
If an anomaly persists, you will only receive one notification at the time at which the metric exceeds your chosen threshold. A new notification is sent if it temporarily falls below the threshold and then rises again.
To facilitate reading multiple notifications, if they are related to the same alert they will be grouped.
How to drill down into an alert
With each individual error alert created, you can access the alert graph to analyze the evolution of all notifications sent and errors generated in the last 8 hours.
1. Navigate to 'Alerts'.
2. Click on an alert from the list
3. From here, you can review and action the following:
Analyze the alert graph
When monitoring a fixed threshold alert:
- Orange line: represents the metric you are monitoring.
- Blue line: represents the threshold you have set to generate notifications.
- Notification icon: represents any points in that period where your threshold has been exceeded and a notification triggered.
From the graph, you can:
- Hover over any of the 5 minute intervals to see the value of the metric being tracked, and how it varies to the threshold you have set.
- Right-click to shortcuts:
- View errors around [XX:XX] time of interest. This will open a side panel where you can see all errors that occurred around that time, and use the three-dot 'more' menu to copy the error details, jump to the error’s details page, or view session replays.
- Access session replays of the errors within a chosen time window; ±5 minutes, ±15 minutes, Full day
Edit and action your alert
- Edit your alert’s;
- Context
- Category and type
- Notification settings
- Action your alert;
- Trigger a demo notification to yourself to see an example
- Copy a direct link to the alert to share with another user
- Duplicate the alert to create another similar
- Share a copy of the alert with another user
- Delete the alert permanently
Go further
Set up a real time error workspace to actively monitor errors on your site or key pages, and use the real time error alerts to be notified about any anomalies.