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@Sunjit Tara

Smart Alerts is one of the key features of Instana. These alerts enhance monitoring efficiency with an intelligent safety net that ensures your overall performance stays optimal allowing you to quickly identify and resolve problems before they impact user experience or system stability.

Configuring Smart Alerts in Instana

You can configure Smart Alerts either globally which is applicable for all the applications or you can choose a specific application perspective. Complete the following steps to configure a Smart Alert for Local Transaction endpoints in SAP.

1.   1. Go to Instana UI -> Applications.

2.   2. Click Smart Alerts tab.

3.   3. Click ADD. The Create global smart alert window is displayed.

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Figure 1: Create global Smart Alert window

1.   4. Select a preconfigured blueprint. For example, select Slow Calls.

For more information about each preconfigured blueprint, see Smart Alerts.

Note:  Slow Calls alerts are created based on the latency of calls for various endpoints.

2.  5. Select the type of threshold: Static or Adaptive. For this example, select Static threshold.

Note: Static thresholds do not change after the Smart Alert is created and Adaptive thresholds continuously evolve and adjust themselves with new data that is observed by Instana. Adaptive thresholds continuously accounts for seasonal changes to the underlying metric without any human intervention. For more information about the threshold, see the threshold section in Instana docs. 

3.   6. Select the scope of the condition as per Endpoint in the context of each Application Perspective

Figure 2: Scope of the condition

7. Select the endpoints to which this configuration has to be applied. In this example the three endpoints for which the alert notifications should be received is selected.

Figure 3: Endpoints

1.  8. Configure the threshold values for which this alert has to be triggered. In this example threshold value is set for 3000ms. The latency beyond this threshold on any of the above endpoints will trigger an alert. 

Figure 4: Setting the threshold value

9. Configure the Evaluation Granularity, Number of Consecutive Evaluations, and Number of Metric Violations to further fine tune the alert.

Figure 5: Configuring number of violations over time

10. Select an alert channel In this example select Email as the alert channel.

Figure 6: Selecting an alert channel

11. Configure Additional Alert properties and Custom payload as required.
                                 

Figure 7: Additional Alert properties & Custom payload

12.  Click Create.
The configuration will trigger an alert if calls take more than 3000ms to complete and generate an Incident for it. The Alert Level for this scenario has been set to a Warning. The Alert Title has been configured to include the Service Name and Endpoint Name so that we can easily identify the affected Transaction Code.

Visualizing Smart Alerts

Smart alerts in Instana are interactive and confined to the specific issue you've configured, ensuring that you can focus on the issue without being distracted by other components.

The following image shows the Email alert message.

Figure 8: Email alert

• The title clearly displays the specific Service and Endpoint that triggered the alert.  It is clear that the threshold value has been breached by this particular endpoint. The Email body contains the following information:
  
  

o   Alert details

o   Custom payload (if configured)

o   Total execution time and configured threshold value

You can click View Event to fetch more details, which includes a detailed description on when the threshold was breached and Call Latency. 

Figure 9: Event details

You can click Analyze Calls to view the Unbounded Analytics page where you can view all the calls which breached the threshold.

Figure 10: Unbounded Analytics page

You can explore each of these individual calls in more detail and get insights about the breakdown of events and the time spent on different phases of the transaction. In the following example, it shows that the total time to complete the Execution of ABAP Report Z_EMPLOYEE_LIST_01 was 10708ms. You can also gain a detailed breakdown of the TCode (SE38) execution for this report, including metadata that provides information on who executed the report and when it was run.

Figure 11: Details of individual call

Conclusion

This blog demonstrated a single scenario using Smart Alerts, but the capabilities of Smart Alerts go far beyond this example. With Smart Alerts, you can detect unauthorized transactions by any user, identify errors in transactions, and much more.

One of the key benefits of Smart Alerts is that you can use the template with minor adjustments to its parameters to cover a wide range of different scenarios. This allows you to quickly and easily deploy Smart Alerts to any Instana application, streamlining your monitoring and alerting processes.