At the end of November, we’ll be migrating the Sematext Logs backend from Elasticsearch to OpenSearch

Alert rule runbooks and descriptions

July 20, 2021

Regardless of which notification hook(s) you are using for your alerts in Sematext, the notification always contains a link to a view in Sematext that we internally call the Alert Landing Page. This page provides several details about a specific alert incident and serves as the jump-off point for any further troubleshooting you may need to perform. A while back we added the ability to add Runbooks and Descriptions for alert rules and we’ve recently tweaked the Alert Landing Page to expose the Runbook more or, if you have not defined the Runbook for a given alert rule, make it easy for you to add it, as shown in the screenshot below.

Sematext Alert Landing Page

Runbooks are “recipes” that consist of actions one may want to perform when something breaks in a previously observed and documented fashion. You can style Runbooks using Markdown, so you can structure them however you wish to make them easier for your teammates to follow even when they are half asleep.

You can view all your alert rules here (EU) and edit them to add Runbooks. We strongly recommend you also add a description to each alert rule. They will help both you and your teammates understand why some alert rule was created long after the person who created it is no longer around to ask.

Learn more about Runbooks in Wikipedia.