Alerting Overview

Kentik includes two alerting systems that can notify you of DDoS attacks and a wide variety other traffic and performance anomalies. These two systems are discussed in the following topics:

• Policy-based Alerting
• Synthetics Alerting

The policy-based alerting system is built around alert policies that define the conditions in which an alert will enter alarm state. Policies are defined using the Alert Policy Settings page, which is accessed via the Alert Policies tab of the Alerting page (Alerts » Alerting). Each policy-based alert includes one or more thresholds for triggering an alarm and specifying the actions — notification and/or mitigation — that result when alarm state is entered.

For more information about the policy-based alerting system and the alarms it generates, refer to the following KB articles:

• Policy Alerts Overview: A high-level explanation of the policy-based alerting system.
• Alert Policies: Managing policies and setting a policy.
• Alerting: Viewing alerts that are either currently active were previously active.
• Notifications: Specify who is notified about alerts and how they are notified.
• Mitigations Overview: Define mitigation platforms and methods as well as when mitigation should be applied.

Note: Please contact support@kentik.com to provide feedback or request assistance with policy-based alerting.

Kentik’s synthetic testing (see About Synthetics) includes an alerting system that generates alerts based on the health of tested entities as reflected in test results:

• The health status for a tested entity is defined with thresholds that can be set on the Health tab of the Test Control Center when a test is added or edited (see Health Settings).
• The metrics for which health status is available depend on the type of the test (see Health Options by Test Type).
• The conditions under which an alert will be generated in response to the crossing of a given threshold are specified on the Alerting and Notifications tab (see Alerting Conditions).

For more information, see Alerting and Notifications.