Alerting

Early issue detecting and prevention, ensuring high availability, and performance optimization are only a few of the reasons why alerting plays a major role for modern applications, databases, and services.

There are a variety of different alerting solutions you can use in conjunction with Timescale that are part of the PostgreSQL ecosystem. Regardless of whether you are creating custom alerts embedded in your applications, or using third-party alerting tools to monitor event data across your organization, there are a wide selection of tools available.

Grafana is a great way to visualize your analytical queries, and it has a first-class integration with Timescale. Beyond data visualization, Grafana also provides alerting functionality to keep you notified of anomalies.

Within Grafana, you can define alert rules which are time-based thresholds for your dashboard data (for example, "Average CPU usage greater than 80 percent for 5 minutes"). When those alert rules are triggered, Grafana sends a message via the chosen notification channel. Grafana provides integration with webhooks, email and more than a dozen external services including Slack and PagerDuty.

To get started, first download and install Grafana. Next, add a new PostgreSQL data source that points to your Timescale instance. This data source was built by Timescale engineers, and it is designed to take advantage of the database's time-series capabilities. From there, proceed to your dashboard and set up alert rules as described above.

Warning

Alerting is only available in Grafana v4.0 and later.

Timescale works with a variety of alerting tools within the PostgreSQL ecosystem. Users can use these tools to set up notifications about meaningful events that signify notable changes to the system.

Some popular alerting tools that work with Timescale include:

• DataDog
• Nagios
• Zabbix