Responding to Alerts
Best practices for investigating and resolving alerts.
When an alert fires, you have several options for responding. This guide covers the common actions and best practices for handling alerts effectively.
Resolving alerts
When an issue has been fixed, mark the alert as resolved.
Open the alert
Access the alert from the dashboard inbox, a Slack notification, or directly from the alert thread.
Click Resolve
Click the Resolve button on the alert card or in the alert actions menu.
Add resolution notes (optional)
Describe what fixed the issue. These notes are saved in the alert history and help with post-mortems.
Confirm resolution
The alert moves to the Resolved state and no longer appears in your active inbox.
Adding resolution notes
Resolution notes provide valuable context for future reference:
- What fixed the issue: Describe the specific change or action
- Root cause: If different from Chat's analysis, note the actual cause
- Prevention: Any follow-up work needed to prevent recurrence
These notes appear in the alert history and can be reviewed during post-mortems or when similar issues occur.
Muting alerts
Sometimes you need to suppress notifications without resolving the alert.
When to mute
- Known issue: You are aware of the problem and actively working on it
- Planned maintenance: Expected behavior during a maintenance window
- Noise reduction: Focusing on a related incident and need fewer distractions
How to mute
From the alert card, click Mute. The alert remains open but:
- No new Slack notifications for this alert
- No email or SMS notifications
- The alert is still visible in the dashboard
Unmuting
When ready to receive notifications again, click Unmute on the alert card.
Muting is temporary. Consider resolving the alert once the underlying issue is truly fixed, rather than leaving it muted indefinitely.
Investigating in the thread
For complex issues, continue the investigation in the alert thread:
Click the alert to open the thread
Every alert is linked to the thread where it was created.
Continue asking questions
Chat has full context about the issue. Ask follow-up questions to dig deeper.
All context is preserved
Previous queries, log results, and analysis are all visible in the thread history.
The thread provides a richer investigation environment than the alert card alone, with access to the full conversation history and the ability to run additional queries.