Alert Clearing

There are two primary states of an alert: active and cleared. An alert is active when the conditions set forth in the global alert conditions are met. A global alert is only cleared once all the location alerts associated with it have cleared. For more information about global and location alerts, see Global and Location Alert Conditions.

For example, if the alert conditions specify that a minimum of three agents have to meet location alert conditions in order to trigger a global alert, once those three (or more) agents are in an alert state, all of the agents must no longer meet location alert criteria for the global alert to be cleared. This means that if at least one of those agents is still in the alert state, the global alert will remain active. The global alert will not show as cleared until that last agent is no longer meeting the location alert criteria.

Clearing an Alert

There are two ways to manually clear an alert from the Alert List. The first is to remove the alert rule from the test. The second, and recommended way, is to adjust the alert conditions.

To remove an alert from a test:

  1. Go to the test configuration page (for example, Cloud and Enterprise Agents > Test Settings > Tests).

  2. Click to open the Basic Configuration pane of the test you wish to remove the alert from.

  3. Open the dropdown under Alerts.

  4. Deselect any alerts you wish to remove from the test.

While this method removes the alert from the Active Alert list, we recommend adjusting the alert conditions instead. These adjustments can also work to clear an alert, and is much less drastic than removing an alert rule from a test entirely. Learn how to adjust alert conditions by reducing noise in alerts. Alternatively, try using one of our dynamic baselining methods, which adjusts the alert rule thresholds in line with the test's recent behavior, greatly reducing noise.

Clearing Through Suppression

Real-time suppression windows can be used to temporarily move an alert from the Active Alerts screen to the Alerts History screen, thereby 'clearing' the alert from your active alert list. See Real-time Alert Suppression Windows to learn how and why to do this.

Alert Auto-Clear

There are times when an alert trigger (e.g., agent or BGP monitor) becomes associated with a global alert, but then goes offline and stops being able to send data to the ThousandEyes platform. This results in the alert staying perpetually active because the alert trigger can’t provide data to clear the alert state. ThousandEyes automatically clears these alerts if the alert trigger is unable to send data for at least 12 hours. When alerts are cleared in this way, the Current Metric field on the Alerts > Alert List > Alerts History page automatically updates to "N/A (No Longer Valid)", and sends you a notification of the cleared alert if you have opted into alert clearing notifications.

Clearing Rules for Proxy Agents

Proxied agents can only collect proxied metrics. They will not collect non-proxy metrics such as packet loss, latency, and jitter. Thus, any active alerts using non-proxy conditions can never be cleared by proxied agents (for more on setting up proxy agents, see Proxy Environments). To avoid this, we recommend separating any tests and alert rules for proxied agents from those for non-proxied agents. Tests that collect proxy metrics should only be assigned to the proxied agents and should use proxy metric-based alert rules. Tests without any proxied agents should use non-proxy metric-based alert rules.

If you run into the above situation where an alert is not clearing due to missing data or a mismatch in proxy versus non-proxy metrics, you can manually clear the alert by un-assigning the alert rule from the test and waiting for a round of data collection. This will clear the alert. You should then further refine the alert rule to match the specific criteria you need before re-assigning it to a test, based on the guidelines above.

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