Adding Alert Actions

Use the alert action to generate alerts based on message context in a pipeline, to send to an alert destination. Unlike SLA alerts, notifications generated by the alert action are primarily intended for business purposes, or to report errors, and not for monitoring system health. Alert destinations should be configured and chosen with this in mind. To learn more about alert destinations, see Alert Destinations.

If pipeline alerting is not enabled for the service or at the domain level, the configured alert action is bypassed during message processing.

Before you begin

These instructions assume you are already editing a message flow in the Edit Message Flow page, as explained in Creating, Editing, and Viewing Message Flows.

To add an Alert action

  1. Navigate to where you want to add the action, as described in Adding and Editing Actions in Message Flows.
  2. Click the appropriate icon, then select Add an Action > Reporting > Alert.
  3. Click <Destination>. The Select Alert Destination page is displayed. Select the required alert destination from the list and click Submit.
  4. By default, the alert will always go to the console.

  5. Click <Expression>. The XQuery Expression Editor page is displayed. You specify the message context to be added to the alert message through XQuery expressions on context variables. See Creating and Editing Inline XQuery and XPath Expressions.
  6. In the alert summary field, enter a short description of the alert. This will be the subject line in the case of an E-mail notification, and can contain no more than 80 characters. If no description is provided, a predefined subject line that reads, "ALSB Alert", will be used instead.
  7. In the severity level drop-down list, select a severity level for this alert from among: Normal, Warning, Minor, Major, Critical, and Fatal.

After you finish

When you complete the configuration of this action, continue by configuring other actions or by saving your configuration, as described in Adding and Editing Actions in Message Flows.

Tip: In order to prevent exceptions from aborting the message being processed, when generating a pipeline alert, it is recommended that an error handler for the alert action be defined to handle and contain such exceptions locally, rather than having them bubble up to a global error handler.