Volume

Use cases

Volume monitors address a few common use cases:

• Alert if a size change for a table is unusually large or small. For example, if a table normally adds 3,000 - 5,000 rows per day, but suddenly adds 20,000.
• Alert if the row count decreases, for a table where decreases are rare.
• Alert if a table has gone an unusually long without a change in size. For example, if a table normally increases in size every 3 hours, but has gone 7 hours without a size change. This can help detect silent failures where jobs are continuing to run, but no data is flowing through the pipeline.

Interacting with volume monitors

Volume monitors take 2 forms:

• Automated volume monitoring is managed from the Volume section on the Assets > Summary page.
• Manual volume monitoring is managed using Volume Rules, which can be created from the Monitors tab or from within Assets.

This is unlike Freshness, where both automatic and manual thresholds are managed from Assets. In time, we will change Volume monitoring so that it is managed similar to Freshness, with automatic and manual thresholds managed in a single place per table.

To set up manual thresholds for Volume, please see our documentation on Volume Rules.

Adjusting sensitivity for automatic volume monitors

Volume monitors with automated thresholds are managed from Assets. From the Volume section on the Assets > Summary page, users can see the current threshold, adjust the sensitivity, or disable volume monitoring.

Click View Details. There are distinct sections for the Unchanged Size Monitor, and the Volume Change Monitor. Click Edit to adjust the alert threshold or to disable monitoring.

Users can select between between low, medium, and high sensitivity, or choose to disable monitoring. Learn more about how the machine learning works for Unchanged Size and Volume Change.

Notifications

For purposes of routing notifications, the incidents from volume monitors are Volume anomalies, with subcategories for Unchanged size, Size increase, and Size decrease.

Notifications from Volume Rules are handled differently. They will be sent to whichever audiences are explicitly added to the Volume Rule.