Monitor your database fleet with alerting policies

This document describes how to use the Database Center to use alerting policies and incidents created by them to monitor your database fleet. You can create alerting policies, which actively monitor metric data. When the values of that metric meet conditions set in the alerting policy, an incident is created. An incident is a record of when the conditions of the policy are violated.

Before you begin

Complete the following in the Google Cloud project that stores your alerting policies:

View incidents and policies

Incidents created by alerting policies in your Google Cloud project help you monitor your database fleet in Database Center. To see the alerting policies that are configured for your Google Cloud project and incidents created by them, do the following:

  1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Database Center page.

    Database Center

    When you open Database Center for the first time, the dashboard displays all available databases, resources, health issues, and database issues for your selected scope.

  2. In the Google Cloud console menu bar, select a Google Cloud project.

  3. Click Alerts in the Database Center dashboard.

The Alerts tab includes the following:

  • An Incidents pane that lists all incidents in your database fleet created by the alerting policies that are configured in your Google Cloud project.

  • A Policies pane that lists the alerting policies that are configured for your Google Cloud project

Learn about an incident

An incident is a record of when the condition or conditions of an alerting policy are met. This information can help you troubleshoot the issues that caused the incident.

To view details about an incident, in the Incidents pane, click an incident in the Incident summary column. The incident opens in Google Cloud Observability and you can see data captured when the incident was opened. For example, details might include metric data and show when the threshold for alerting policy was violated. This page also displays other information to help you understand the failure, like logs and labels.

To learn more about incidents, including how to investigate and manage an incident, see Incidents for metric-based alerting policies in the Google Cloud Observability documentation.

Learn about and manage a policy

An alerting policy describes the circumstances under which you want to be alerted and how you want to be notified about an incident. When that data monitored by the alerting policy meets the alerting policy condition, Google Cloud Observability creates an incident and sends the notifications.

To view the details of an alerting policy, in the Policies pane, click the name of the policy. The details for the policy open in Google Cloud Observability and include information about the metric type being monitored, the threshold, and user-defined labels.

To learn more about alerting policies, see Manage alerting policies in the Google Cloud Observability documentation.

Create, edit, copy, or delete an alerting policy

In Database Center, you can create, edit, copy, or delete an alerting policy. After you start one of these actions, you complete the process in Google Cloud Observability.

  • To create an alerting policy, click Create new alert policy. For more information, see Create an alerting policy in the Google Cloud Observability documentation.

  • To edit or copy a policy, click More options for a policy in the Policies pane, and select the corresponding option. Editing and copying a policy is similar to creating a metric-based alerting policy. However, not all fields can be modified. When done, click Save policy.

  • To delete a policy, click More options for a policy in the Policies pane, and select Delete. In the confirmation dialog, select Delete.

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