In his Open Letter To Monitoring/Metrics/Alerting Companies, John Allspaw asserts that attempting "to detect anomalies perfectly, at the right time, is not possible".

I have seen several attempts by talented engineers to build systems to automatically detect and diagnose problems based on time series data. While it is certainly possible to get a demonstration working, the data always turned out to be too noisy to make this approach work for anything but the simplest of real-world systems.

All hope is not lost though. There are many common anomalies which you can detect and handle with custom-built rules. The Prometheus query language gives you the tools to discover these anomalies while avoiding false positives.

Building a query

A common problem within a service is when a small number of servers are not performing as well as the rest, such as responding with increased latency.

Let us say that we have a metric instance:latency_seconds:mean5m representing the average query latency for each instance of a service, calculated via a recording rule from a Summary metric.

A simple way to start would be to look for instances with a latency more than two standard deviations above the mean:

instance:latency_seconds:mean5m > on (job) group_left() ( avg by (job)(instance:latency_seconds:mean5m) + on (job) 2 * stddev by (job)(instance:latency_seconds:mean5m) )

You try this out and discover that there are false positives when the latencies are very tightly clustered. So you add a requirement that the instance latency also has to be 20% above the average:

( instance:latency_seconds:mean5m > on (job) group_left() ( avg by (job)(instance:latency_seconds:mean5m) + on (job) 2 * stddev by (job)(instance:latency_seconds:mean5m) ) ) > on (job) group_left() 1.2 * avg by (job)(instance:latency_seconds:mean5m)

Finally, you find that false positives tend to happen at low traffic levels. You add a requirement for there to be enough traffic for 1 query per second to be going to each instance. You create an alert definition for all of this:

groups: - name: Practical Anomaly Detection rules: - alert: InstanceLatencyOutlier expr: > ( ( instance:latency_seconds:mean5m > on (job) group_left() ( avg by (job)(instance:latency_seconds:mean5m) + on (job) 2 * stddev by (job)(instance:latency_seconds:mean5m) ) ) > on (job) group_left() 1.2 * avg by (job)(instance:latency_seconds:mean5m) and on (job) avg by (job)(instance:latency_seconds_count:rate5m) > 1 ) for: 30m

Automatic actions

The above alert can feed into the Alertmanager, and from there to your chat, ticketing, or paging systems. After a while you might discover that the usual cause of the alert is something that there is not a proper fix for, but there is an automated action such as a restart, reboot, or machine replacement that resolves the issue.

Rather than having humans handle this repetitive task, one option is to get the Alertmanager to send the alert to a web service that will perform the action with appropriate throttling and safety features.

The generic webhook sends alert notifications to an HTTP endpoint of your choice. A simple Alertmanager configuration that uses it could look like this:

# A simple notification configuration which only sends alert notifications to # an external webhook. receivers: - name: restart_webhook webhook_configs: url: "http://example.org/my/hook" route: receiver: restart_webhook

Summary

The Prometheus query language allows for rich processing of your monitoring data. This lets you to create alerts with good signal-to-noise ratios, and the Alertmanager's generic webhook support can trigger automatic remediations. This all combines to enable oncall engineers to focus on problems where they can have the most impact.

When defining alerts for your services, see also our alerting best practices.