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Autocorrelate Alerts With Squadcast’s Key-Based Deduplication

#oncall #incidentmanagement

Originally published on Squadcast.com.

With the increasing complexity of technology stacks and monitoring tools, managing incidents can become overwhelming, leading to alert noise, alert fatigue, and delayed responses. This is where Key-Based Deduplication comes to the rescue, streamlining incident handling and enhancing the effectiveness of your Incident Management platform.

Never Ending Incoming Alerts!

Consider a common scenario: you're using an alert source like Prometheus, a popular monitoring tool. As your system monitors various aspects of your infrastructure, you might receive multiple alerts for the same issue from the same monitoring tool (in this case, Prometheus) within a specific time window. Similarly, you might encounter situations where different services generate similar alerts. 

The challenge arises when a significant event occurs, causing a flurry of alerts to flood your Incident Management platform. For instance, if a large cluster in your system goes down, each node in that cluster might generate its own alert, potentially inundating your system with notifications. This not only creates alert noise but also overwhelms your incident responders, making it difficult to prioritize and address incidents effectively.

Key-Based Deduplication: A Solution to Reduce Alert Noise

Key-based deduplication offers a powerful solution to these challenges by clubbing together similar alerts or correlating them based on user-defined keys. 

Let's take a closer look at how Key-Based Deduplication can help:

Correlating Similar Alerts

With Key-Based Deduplication, you can dynamically group similar alerts together based on specific attributes. For instance, if you're dealing with a massive cluster outage, you can use the cluster name as the expression for your deduplication key. As a result, all alerts generated by nodes within the same cluster will be correlated and treated as a single incident. This prevents your Incident Management platform from being flooded with redundant alerts.

Effective Alert Prioritization

Key-Based Deduplication enables your incident responders to focus on the most critical alerts first. Instead of receiving multiple notifications for the same incident, they are notified only once, with subsequent alerts being appended to the existing incident. This allows your team to allocate their time and resources more efficiently, ensuring that urgent incidents are addressed promptly.

Alert Deduplication Rulesare also a way to suppress duplicate alerts. Both are two different approaches to eliminating duplicate alerts within various services.  

Try this: The Auto Pause Transient Alerts (APTA) feature detects alerts that typically auto-resolve within a short time period and it temporarily pauses notifications for such transient alerts.

Key Based Deduplication Vs Alert Deduplication

Key-Based Deduplication uses a unique identifier or key to identify and remove duplicate alerts. It compares the keys of each entry and eliminates duplicates based on these keys. This method is typically faster but may result in some false positives if keys are not completely unique. So, make sure to create unique keys!

Alert Deduplication rules, on the other hand, use predefined criteria or rules to identify and remove duplicate data. These rules can be customized to meet specific requirements, allowing for more flexibility in determining what constitutes a duplicate. However, this method may be slower as it involves complex logic processing.

Setting Up Key-Based Deduplication in Squadcast: Step-by-Step Guide

Implementing Key-Based Deduplication in Squadcast is a straightforward process that can yield substantial benefits. Here's how you can set it up in Squadcast: 

  1. Log in to your Squadcast account and navigate to the Services section. From the Service Overview, select or search for the desired service.
  2. In the Automation section of the service details, expand the accordion and click View All.
  3. Within the Key Based Deduplication section, click Add Dedup Key.

4. Select the alert source for which you want to create deduplication keys.

  1. On the right side of the screen, you'll see the payload of the latest alert generated by the chosen alert source.
  2. Define a template for generating deduplication keys using variables from the alert payload. This template will help Squadcast identify and group duplicate alerts.
  3. Define the deduplication time window in minutes or hours. This determines the maximum time interval during which alerts are considered duplicates.
  4. Once you've configured the deduplication key and time window, click Save to apply the settings.

By following these steps, you can implement Key-Based Deduplication for your Incident Management process, significantly reducing alert noise and enhancing the efficiency of your incident responders.

Why Use Key-Based Deduplication?

The benefits of adopting key-based deduplication are far-reaching and can transform your Incident Management workflows. Here's a recap of the advantages you can expect: 

  1. Reduced Alert Noise: By grouping similar alerts, key-based deduplication ensures that your Incident Management platform isn't inundated with redundant notifications, allowing your team to focus on what matters most.
  2. Enhanced Alert Prioritization: Incident responders can efficiently prioritize and address critical alerts, leading to faster incident resolution and reduced downtime.
  3. Optimized Resource Allocation: With fewer redundant alerts to manage, your team can allocate their time and resources more effectively, leading to improved overall efficiency.
  4. Mitigated Alert Fatigue: Key-Based Deduplication prevents alert fatigue by consolidating alerts and providing responders with the time and mental space needed to analyze and resolve incidents thoroughly.

Your Pathway to Data Perfection

Key-Based Deduplication is an important feature offered by Squadcast that enables IT teams to manage incidents with greater efficiency and precision. By intelligently correlating and grouping similar alerts, Key-Based Deduplication helps alleviate alert noise, prioritize critical incidents, and optimize resource utilization.

What you should do now* Schedule a demo with Squadcast to learn about the platform, answer your questions, and evaluate if Squadcast is the right fit for you.

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