Alert excludes

As a Metaplane customer, you’re used to getting timely alerts about your data. The row count of one of your tables suddenly skyrocketed. The standard deviation of the data in an important table just decreased enough to raise the alarm. Your engineering team just added three tables, and took two away. All those alerts keep you in the loop so you can know everything about how your data is behaving and how your team is interacting with your data stack.

But wait—you probably don’t want alerts about everything, right? You don’t want alerts about the experimental monitors that Sarah set up last week in your #on-call-alerts channel. You don’t want your team that monitors finance data to be getting alerts about your product data.

Metaplane’s existing alert rules could get you pretty far if you wanted highly customized alert routing rules. You could have Metaplane send alerts about data anomalies in individual databases, schemas, tables, or columns to a particular email address. You could have Metaplane  let you know about any data quality issues related to tables or monitors tagged with a particular tag. But in our quest to reduce the noise and make sure you only get alerts about the things that matter most, we’re excited to announce our newest feature: alert excludes.

Now, in addition to including tags or parts of your data stack, you can exclude them as well. Here are some use cases.

• You want to receive alerts about everything in your main channel, except any monitors tagged as 🏷️ experimental.
• You want to receive alerts about everything in your ANALYTICS database, except for alerts related to any of the tables in your INVENTORY schema—that goes to a different team.
• You’ve tagged all the alerts that belong to individual analysts on your team, and you want to send any alerts that aren’t owned by someone on your team to a particular channel.

As part of this update, the whole alert settings UI has gotten a refresh. Adding rules is much easier than before, and it’s now easier than ever to see which rules apply to which alert destinations.

Along with this update comes an additional change to the alert settings functionality: you will no longer be able to route alerts for individual custom SQL monitors. Not to fear—you can still achieve the same functionality by tagging whichever custom SQL monitors you want to send to a particular channel, then adding a tag rule to that channel.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be encouraging you to transition your custom SQL monitor rules into tag rules. There’s even an easy way to migrate them right from the alert settings page.

Alert excludes has been a highly requested feature, and we hope you find it useful.