What Alert Rules Are
An alert rule is a threshold-based policy attached to a monitor. When a monitor’s check results satisfy the rule’s conditions, PulseGuard dispatches notifications to every channel configured on that rule. You can attach multiple rules to a single monitor — for example, one rule that pages your on-call channel immediately on any failure, and a second rule that emails a reporting list only on recovery. Rules evaluate after the underlying check has already passed PulseGuard’s multi-vector verification layer. This means by the time a rule sees a failure, the platform has already confirmed the issue from multiple geographic vantage points.PulseGuard runs a double-check protocol before declaring a monitor DOWN: every failure is automatically re-verified from alternate edge regions before a status change is recorded. The
alertThreshold you configure on an alert rule is a separate, additional layer — it controls how many confirmed DOWN results must accumulate before a notification fires.Key Fields
alertThreshold
The number of consecutive confirmed failures that must occur before the rule fires. Defaults to
1, meaning the first confirmed failure triggers a notification. Raise this value to reduce noise for monitors that experience brief, acceptable blips.Notification Channels
One or more destinations where alerts are sent — Email, Slack, Discord, Webhook, Telegram, or SMS. A single rule can fan out to multiple channels simultaneously.
Trigger Type
What condition activates the rule:
STATUS_CHANGE (UP↔DOWN transitions), LATENCY (response time exceeds a threshold), or SSL_EXPIRY (certificate nearing expiration).Target Status
Optionally narrow a
STATUS_CHANGE rule to fire only on DOWN or only on UP. Leave blank to match both directions (useful for combined downtime + recovery alerts).Flapping Detection
Monitors that oscillate rapidly between UP and DOWN — often caused by flaky network paths or unstable backend restarts — generate a disproportionate number of alerts without representing genuine, actionable outages. PulseGuard suppresses this noise automatically. When a monitor goes DOWN and then recovers within a short window, PulseGuard detects the instability and re-opens the existing incident rather than creating a new one, appending a “Flapping detected” audit entry to the incident timeline. This keeps your alert history clean and prevents on-call channels from flooding during chaotic recovery events.Rate Limiting and Alert Storms
Even outside flapping scenarios, repeated failures on a monitor can generate more notifications than your team can usefully consume. PulseGuard’s notification pipeline enforces rate-limiting at the delivery layer, preventing the same alert from hammering a channel repeatedly within a short window. Notifications are deduplicated and delivered in order, giving you a reliable stream rather than a burst of duplicate messages.Recovery Alerts
When a monitor transitions from DOWN back to UP, PulseGuard can notify the same channels that received the downtime alert. To receive recovery notifications, configure your alert rule’s target status to matchUP, or leave the target status blank so the rule fires on any status transition.
Recovery notifications include the total downtime duration — calculated as the elapsed time between the last recorded DOWN event and the recovery timestamp — so your team has immediate context without digging through logs.
How to Create an Alert Rule
1
Open the monitor
Navigate to Dashboard → Monitors and select the monitor you want to configure. Click the Alert Rules tab on the monitor detail page.
2
Add a new rule
Click Add Alert Rule. Give the rule a descriptive name (for example, “Critical — Page On-Call”) and select a trigger type: Status Change, Latency, or SSL Expiry.
3
Set the threshold
Enter a value for Alert Threshold — the number of consecutive confirmed failures required before the rule fires. The default is
1. For production-critical monitors you likely want to keep this at 1; for lower-priority monitors consider 2 or 3 to absorb transient blips.4
Configure conditions (optional)
For Status Change rules, optionally pin the rule to a specific target status (
DOWN or UP). For Latency rules, set the threshold in milliseconds and choose a comparison operator (GT for “greater than” or LT for “less than”). For SSL Expiry rules, set the number of days remaining that should trigger the alert.5
Attach notification channels
Select one or more notification channels from the dropdown. If you have not created any channels yet, click New Channel to configure one inline. See Notification Channels for setup instructions for each channel type.
6
Enable and save
Toggle the rule to Enabled and click Save. The rule takes effect on the next check cycle — typically within one minute.