About the Dynamic Thresholds app
The Dynamic Thresholds app is designed to help you monitor your systems more intelligently and reduce alert fatigue. Traditional static thresholds often generate unnecessary alerts when normal fluctuations occur, overwhelming teams and diverting attention from real issues. In contrast, the Dynamic Thresholds app provides adaptive, data-driven anomaly detection by learning from historical data and automatically adjusting to expected behavior. This ensures that alerts focus on statistically significant deviations, allowing you to respond only to genuine anomalies.
Use the Dynamic Thresholds app to set up and manage dynamic thresholds for various metrics. The app leverages a deviation model that learns the historical behavior of your metrics, automatically establishing and adjusting flexible upper and lower boundaries.
The app also offers:
- Configurable warning and critical severity levels for alert escalation.
- Adjustable training period to fine-tune adaptability to recent patterns.
- Noise reduction features, including metric smoothing and configurable alert delays, to minimize false positives.
From the app’s main screen, you can:
- View a list of all existing dynamic threshold configurations.
- Edit an existing dynamic threshold configuration by clicking on a row.
- See the status of each configuration. With an admin account, you can toggle the Enabled checkbox of a configuration directly from the table to activate or deactivate a configuration.
- Identify the name, metric, group, number of entities, who created the configuration, and last modified date for each configuration.
- Search for any string field in the configurations.
Define a new dynamic threshold configuration Copied
Tip
Watch this product demo tour in full screen to learn how to create a dynamic threshold configuration for your metrics.
Dry run results Copied
Once a metric is selected, a chart is automatically generated on the right-hand side of the screen. This chart shows the metrics and thresholds for any matching entity within the last 24 hours and provides a comprehensive view of your metric behavior.
This chart also displays:
-
The primary metric value and its statistical spread, providing better insight into data variability and confidence.
-
A shaded range for each data sample which represents the statistical distribution of values, including the minimum and maximum bounds and 25th to 75th percentile ranges.
-
Aggregation of scalar metric values during threshold calculations for more precise results. Click on the
icon to select your preferred aggregation method:
- Mean - the average value over the time window.
- Min - the minimum value in the time window.
- Max - the maximum value in the time window.
- Percentile - a configurable percentile (min, p5, p25, p50, p75, p95, max).
Note
Custom aggregations are only available when your configuration meets the following conditions:
- Scalar metrics are used, not histogram metrics nor rolling window.
- Noise reduction is set to None or Alert Delay.
- Use raw values option is disabled.
When these conditions are not met, the aggregation controls will be disabled with a helpful tooltip explaining what needs to be changed.
-
Raw data when the Use raw values button is enabled. The chart will display the metric line using raw data instead of downsample data. Raw values can only be viewed while editing a configuration and will not persist upon saving.
Use this chart to preview the behavior of your dynamic threshold configuration. Changing the selected metric or adjusting the thresholds and training window sliders will automatically update the chart.
Click Analyse Results to simulate the configuration for matching entities. The Dry Run Results table then gives you an overview of how the configuration impacts most entities. You can click on a row to preview the dynamic threshold behavior for a specific entity and adjust your configuration based on these results.
When you adjust your configuration, a banner will appear indicating that the results are no longer valid. Click Refresh Results to show the updated results based on the new configuration.