Alerts

Spotflow provides an end-to-end alerting solution designed specifically for fleets of embedded devices.

This page walks you through key aspects of Spotflow alerting, from setting up alerting rules to understanding how metrics are evaluated.

Alert rules evaluate system or custom application metrics to notify you of important events.

Device Metrics Integration

Spotflow allows you to define alerting rules based on metrics collected from your embedded devices.

Alert Rules

Alert rules define the conditions under which you want to be notified about certain events or changes in your embedded device fleet. You can create alert rules based on System Metrics (e.g. CPU usage, memory usage) or Custom Application Metrics (e.g. button presses, battery level, operation duration).

Query

The core of an alert rule is a query that selects the relevant metric data. The query can either return:

• A single time series. E.g. average CPU usage across all devices or for a specific device.
• Multiple time series. E.g. CPU usage for each individual device.

Condition

The condition defines the criteria that trigger an alert. An alert is triggered when any of the returned time series meet the specified condition. For example, if the query is grouped by device ID, an alert is triggered when any one device exceeds the threshold.

Spotflow supports two types of conditions:

• Threshold: Alert when a metric crosses a fixed threshold value. For example, CPU usage above 90%.
• Percentual Change: Alert when a metric changes by a percentage over time. For example, battery voltage drops by 20%.

Optionally, you can also configure an alert to trigger when no data is received, which is useful for detecting a device going offline or failing to report a specific metric.

Intervals Configuration

Alert rules are evaluated at regular intervals, which can be configured when creating the alert rule.

You can specify:

• Evaluation Interval: How often the alert rule is evaluated. For example, every 5 minutes.
• Evaluation Window: The time range of data that is considered for evaluation. For example, the last 1 hour.
• First Evaluation At: When the first evaluation should happen. For example, immediately, at the start of the next hour or at midnight.

Alert

When the condition of an alert rule is met, an alert is triggered. The alert contains information about the time it was triggered, the metric values that caused the trigger, and any relevant metadata (e.g. device ID).

Alert Resolution

When an alert is triggered, it remains active until the condition is no longer met. For example, if the CPU usage remains above 90%, the alert stays active. Once the CPU usage drops below 90%, the alert will resolve.

Notification Targets

When an alert is triggered or resolved, Spotflow can send email notifications to ensure that the right people are informed.

Notification targets specify who should receive alert notifications.

A Notification Target is a group of email addresses that can be reused across multiple alert rules. For example, you can have a target for the operations team and use it in all critical alert rules.

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