About Alerting

Dash0 provides two complementary approaches to alerting:

• Check rules — threshold-based alerting that fires immediately when conditions are met. Use them to detect performance degradations, error spikes, and service outages.
• SLOs (Service Level Objectives) — reliability targets measured against an error budget over a time window. Use them to track whether your service is as reliable as your users expect.

The Failed Checks View shows you which check rules are currently failing, helping you identify and respond to performance issues and outages affecting your infrastructure and services.

By setting up checks to monitor key metrics and thresholds, you can receive instant alerts, so that you can address issues before they affect customers or disrupt operations.

Monitor your systems by checking metrics, logs, and traces — including RED metrics derived from tracing telemetry and synthetic checks that continuously verify service availability.

With Dash0 Checks, you can:

• Streamline monitoring and response workflows
• Improve operational efficiency
• Maximize system performance

Access and Permissions

Creating check rules requires elevated access. Only users with Admin privileges or those with a Maintainer role within a dataset can create check rules. This restriction is intentional: a check rule directly affects the health status of a service and can send notifications to your team's phones and on-call channels. Users without the required role will not see the alert creation option.

Dashboards, by contrast, can be created by any user since they are purely visual and do not affect service health.

How Alerting Works

Alerting is a regular evaluation to determine whether certain conditions are met. Each failed check is associated with a service based on the attributes of the resulting time series — such as the resource identifier and service name. The coloring you see on service maps reflects the outcome of these checks:

• Gray — healthy, no active check failures
• Yellow — degraded threshold exceeded
• Red — critical threshold exceeded

All alerting is based on counting or measuring values and comparing them against defined numerical thresholds. From a single check rule, any number of distinct time series can fail simultaneously, each representing a separate check result.

Alerting Model

Dash0's alerting model extends the Prometheus alerting model. In Prometheus, an alert fires when the PromQL expression returns more than zero time series. Dash0 adds an optional $__thresholdCopy symbol that lets you specify degraded and critical severity thresholds — but every valid Prometheus alert rule is also a valid Dash0 check rule, with no modifications required.

Synthetic Checks

Synthetic checks are a form of alerting that continuously test service availability using HTTP requests (effectively curlCopy plus alerting). They are kept separate from check rules in the UI, but work on the same underlying notification and routing infrastructure. When creating a synthetic check, you can assign notification channels in the same way as regular check rules.

Get Started

The fastest way to create check rules is to ask Agent0 — describe what you want to monitor and it will generate the check rule for you. For advanced use cases, you can write PromQL directly.

Dash0 is 100% PromQL compatible — existing alerts based on PromQL queries can be imported without modification using the CLI, Terraform provider, Kubernetes Operator, or Agent0.

Provide Context for Faster Response

SLOs: Reliability Targets with Error Budgets

Service Level Objectives (SLOs) extend check rules with an error budget, shifting the question from "did this one request fail?" to "is the service as reliable as our users expect?"

An SLO tracks how fast your error budget is being consumed over a time window (currently 28 days), alerting on burn rate rather than on each individual violation. This provides a more strategic view of reliability compared to threshold-based check rules.

Further Reading

Check Rules

• Create Check Rules — Set up check rules to monitor metrics, logs, spans, and web events using PromQL expressions and threshold values.
• Investigate Failed Checks — Troubleshoot failed checks by exploring the underlying telemetry and identifying root causes.
• Send Check Rule Notifications — Configure notification channels to keep your team informed when checks fail.
• Route Check Rule Notifications — Use label-based routing to direct alerts to the right teams automatically.

SLOs

• About SLOs — What SLOs are, how they extend check rules with an error budget, and key concepts for measuring reliability.
• Create SLOs — Create and manage SLOs through the Dash0 API using OpenSLO definitions.
• View and Analyze SLOs — Use the SLOs catalog and SLO detail page to assess reliability with error budgets and burn-rate views.