Alert Deduplication Rules

Reduce alert noise by grouping similar alerts together

Alert Deduplication can help you reduce alert noise by organising and grouping alerts. This also provides easy access to similar alerts when needed.

This can be achieved by defining Deduplication Rules for each Service in Squadcast. When these rules evaluate to true for an incoming incident, alerts will get deduplicated.

Prerequisites

  • The User Role associated with the user in the Team must have required permissions to manage Services (ability to manage Deduplication Rules).

  • Integrate with an Alert Source and ensure that the Alert Source has started sending alerts to Squadcast before setting up Deduplication Rules.

Creating Deduplication Rules

Ensure that the right Team is chosen from the team picker on the top of the screen.

(1) Click on Services in the primary navigation

(2) Select a Service and click on the More options icon

(3) Click on Deduplication Rules

(4) Click on Add new rule

(5) Select an Alert Source from the drop-down

(6) Deduplication Rules can be added in three ways:

(A) UI-based Rule Builder (Beginner-friendly)

(a) On the right, you can view the payload of the latest alert for the chosen Alert Source

(b) The drop-downs in the Rule Builder contain values from the payload on the right. You can use them to easily create your Deduplication Rules

(c) You can add more than 1 condition for a rule by selecting Add Condition (a logical AND is performed between all the conditions -> the entire Deduplication Rule will evaluate to True only if all the conditions evaluate to True)

Next, choose the Deduplication Time Window. You can deduplicate incidents for a maximum of 48 hours.

(d) Click on Save

(B) Raw String Method

(a) On the right, you can view the payload of the latest alert for the chosen Alert Source

(b) Click on Edit to enable Raw String method

(c) Write your custom Deduplication Rule expression. Below are some examples to help you get started:

Supported Rules

The rule engine supports expressions with parameters, arithmetic, logical, and string operations.

Basic Expressions

10 > 0, 1+2, 100/3

Parameterized Expressions

past.metric == current.metric

The available parameters are past, current and event_count + past : This parameter contains the JSON payload of the previous incident which the current event is compared with + current : This parameter contains the JSON payload of the incoming event which will be compared with the past incidents’ JSON payload + event_count : This denotes the number of deduplicated events for a given incident

Regular Expressions

This can be used to check if a particular JSON payload field matches a regular expression.

re(payload.metric, "disk.*")

Parse JSON content within the payload using jsonPath

General Format jsonPath(<the JSON string that should be parsed for JSON content>, <"the parameter that needs to be picked from the parsed JSON object">)

Example Below is an example payload:

{
	"payload": {
		"Type": "Notification",
		"MessageId": "5966c484-5b37-58df",
		"TopicArn": "arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:51:Test",
		"Message": "{\"AlarmName\":\"Squadcast Testing - Ignore\",\"AlarmDescription\":\"Created from EC2 Console\"}"
	}
}

jsonPath(payload.Message, "AlarmName");

This will pick out the value AlarmName from the Message object in the payload, based on which, you can de-duplicate incidents.

Example

Below is an example payload for demonstration:

{
	"event_count": 5,
	"past": {
		"issue_description": "bug - 2",
		"issue_id": "10029",
		"issue_key": "HYD-30",
		"issue_labels": [],
		"issue_link": "http://13.233.254.18:8080/browse/HYD/issues/HYD-30",
		"issue_priority": "Medium",
		"issue_summary": "bug - 2",
		"issue_type": "Bug",
		"project_id": "10000",
		"project_key": "HYD",
		"project_name": "hydra"
	},
	"source": "grafana"
}

To deduplicate any incoming alert when:

  • The metric matches the regular expression ^disk.*
  • The past incident metric and the current event metric are the same
  • The past incident host and the current event host are the same
  • The current disk usage value is less than 60%
  • The context value tag is same

Deduplication Rule:

past.metric == current.metric &&
	re(current.metric, "^disk.*") &&
	past.host == current.host &&
	current.value < 60 &&
	jsonPath(past.tags, "context.value") ==
		jsonPath(current.tags, "context.value");

Viewing Deduplicated Incidents

From the Incidents page, you can view which incidents have deduplicated events when there is a +<number> next to the Incident ID like in the screenshot below.

The number indicates how many alerts were deduplicated against this incident.

Clicking on such an incident will take you to its Incident Details page where, by clicking on Deduped Events, you will be able to see the following:

  • Number of deduplicated events
  • Time when they reached Squadcast
  • Message and Payload of the event

Clicking on any of the deduplicated events will display will all the information that is sent for that alert from the monitoring tool, including the Deduplication Reason (which Deduplication Rule got executed).

FAQs

(1) Will I get notified for the duplicate alerts that come in for an incident in Triggered state?

No, nobody is notified for the duplicate alerts that come in for an incident in the Triggered or Acknowledged state.

(2) Will I get notified for the duplicate alerts that come in for an incident in Resolved state?

Yes, incident deduplication will not take place for an incident when it is in the Resolved state. Squadcast triggers a fresh incident for such an alert and notifies the right people.

(3) Why can’t I deduplicate incidents for more than 48 hours?

Most organizations across the world follow a best practice of resolving critial incidents within 48 hours of their creation. This is also the reason why, Squadcast allows you to deduplicate incidents for a maximum of 48 hours.

(4) Can I create OR rules?

Yes, you can. The evaluation between different Deduplication Rules is OR.

(5) What kind of regex can be used to write custom rules?

The rule engine supports expressions with parameters, arithmetic, logical, and string operations. You can also check this out to get an idea of all the expression types accepted in Squadcast. Please do your regex here against Golang flavour as shown in the screenshot below and then, set them up in Squadcast:

(6) Do the Deduplication Rules have priority?

Yes, you can specify Execution Rule Priority for the rules defined by moving them Up or Down the list of rules.

(7) While adding a Deduplication Rule, is the search string in the rule case sensitive?

Yes, that is correct. For example, if your seach string is “ALERT” and your payload does not contain “ALERT” but contains “Alert”, this will not be matched. Your search string should be “Alert”.

(8) I have configured multiple rules for a particular Service. Can I search through the configured rules to find the rule I am looking for?

Yes, that is doable. You will notice a Search option on the left-top of the rules modal. You can type in a word you recall from the rule description or the rule itself. Any matching results will yield the narrowed down set of rules.