Notifications 2.0

Notifications 2.0 is the next generation of Monte Carlo's notifications framework. Compared to the legacy notifications framework, 2.0 includes many improvements that simplify user experience and increase flexibility.

Notifications 2.0 is currently only available to some customers. To those who have access, it can be centrally managed from Settings > Notifications 2.0 within Monte Carlo.

Audiences

To send notifications, first create an audience. An audience is a named group of one or more recipients. For example, an audience could include just a single Slack channel. Or it could include two Slack channels, five email addresses, a Microsoft Teams channel, and a pagerduty routing key.

Audiences can either be created from within Settings > Notifications 2.0, or from the Send Notifications section of custom monitor creation. They can be easily edited to add, remove, or change recipients.

Adding notifications to an audience

Once an audience is created, it can either be added directly to custom monitors, or you can create Notification Settings for it. Click the + button in the Other notifications column in the Notifications 2.0 tab to add a Notification Setting for that audience.

A Notification Setting includes options to send notifications from any of Monte Carlo's out-of-the-box monitors, dbt and Airflow failures, and daily digests.

Viewing all your audiences

You can view all your audiences, and their custom monitors and other notification settings, in Settings > Notifications 2.0. But clicking on any of the numbers in the Custom monitors or Other notifications columns, you can see details of the associated monitors and notification configurations.

Differences between 1.0 and 2.0

Notifications 2.0 has several key advantages compared to the legacy notifications framework. In 2.0, the user can:

• Include one or more recipients in an audience, and easily go back to add/remove/edit the recipients
• Create an audience from within custom monitor creation, without needing to leave the custom monitor page
• Assign any type of notification to be sent to an audience.

There are some pieces of functionality from 1.0 that are no longer supported in 2.0. These were deprecated to reduce complexity and improve ease-of-use:

• There no longer is a Notification Settings form for custom monitors in 2.0, and the functionality within that form is deprecated. This includes:
  • 'Custom message' text box. Instead, we recommend including any messages within the 'Notes' section of monitors.
  • AND logic between multiple audiences
  • 'Incident Type' filters
• Prior to April 2023, users were allowed to create Notification Settings that included both automated monitors and custom monitors. This was disallowed after April 2023, but existing settings were left in place. These configurations cannot be recreated as-is in 2.0. The recommended course of action is:
  • Recreate the setting for any automated monitors, pointing to the audience
  • Directly apply the audience the any monitors that would have been included in that notification setting.
• Notifications as Code is being slightly restructured. See Notifications as Code 2.0.