Notifications

Monte Carlo's framework for Notifications makes it easy to send the right alerts to a broad variety of different recipients, including Slack, Microsoft Teams, Email, PagerDuty, Webex, OpsGenie, Jira, ServiceNow, and webhooks.

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, 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. 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 with "Notifications (legacy)"

In October 2023, a new notifications framework was released, called Notifications 2.0. By end of January 2024, over 99% of customers were fully migrated to this new framework. The new framework was then renamed to Notifications and the few customers still on the legacy framework see the tab Notifications (legacy).

Notifications has several key advantages compared to Notifications (legacy), including:

• Large usability improvements
  • Include one or more recipients in an audience, and easily go back to add/remove/edit the recipients
  • Create a new audience from within custom monitor creation, without leaving the custom monitor page
  • Assign any type of notification to be sent to an audience
• New integrations
  • Send notification directly to Jira to create Jira issues
  • Webex
• Expanded support for Notifications as Code
  • Available recipient types is at parity with what is available through the UI

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

• There no longer is a Notification Settings form for custom monitors in the new framework, and the functionality within that form is deprecated. Deprecated functionality includes:
  • 'Custom message' text box. Instead, we recommend including any messages within the 'Notes' section of monitors
  • Routing to a recipient only when multiple audiences match via AND logic
  • '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 new Notifications. 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

GraphQL API

To create and manage new notifications, you should use the Audiences API.

Here's a simplified guide:

Create or Update Audiences:

• Use createOrUpdateAudience to define an audience by specifying its label and notification settings. Note that while these settings are similar to those in createOrUpdateNotificationSetting, they exclude custom messages, notification rules, schedule types, or incident type restrictions.
• Delete an audience with deleteMonitorLabel.
• Manage individual recipients within an audience using createOrUpdateAudienceNotificationSetting and deleteAudienceNotificationSetting.

Configure Audience Routing Rules:

• Use createOrUpdateAudienceRoutingRule to link a notification rule to an audience. This operation's parameters align with those in the rules field of createOrUpdateNotificationSetting.
• Remove a rule with deleteAudienceRoutingRule.

It's recommended to adopt these new operations for setting up audiences, recipients, and rules. Older methods like createOrUpdateNotificationSetting still work for recipient creation (if a new audience parameter is provided), but they lack certain features (such as custom messages or digest settings) and won't be updated with future enhancements.