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Understanding how alerts work in DEM

Preamble​

DEM can alert you about many different events. If you haven't enabled alerts yet, see:

Receive and configure alerts

This article describes the types of alerts you may receive and helps you understand and analyze them.

Available by email on all licenses. Slack, Chat, and SMS alerts may depend on your plan.

These alerts trigger when our probes detect an anomaly in one of your user journeys (scenarios). There are two main categories.

Alerts on scenario status​

These alerts fire when a monitored scenario is failing for several minutes — by default, 3 failures within a 5-minute window.

A resolution notification is sent once the scenario returns to normal for several minutes — by default, 5 successes within a 5-minute window. At that point the alert is considered closed.

Notifications are sent via your chosen channel (email, SMS, or Slack).

Example alerts we can send:

  • Expected string/element not found
  • Step timeout
  • Scenario timeout
  • Invalid return code
  • Dynamic selector not found
  • Network error while receiving data
  • SSL negotiation error

These alerts are also visible on your scenarios; red bars appear on charts when they occur.

Alerts on scenario execution time​

These alerts are sent when our probes detect a variation in scenario execution time that exceeds the threshold you configured.

Every minute, the scenario's current execution time is compared with a reference period based on your chosen baseline (daily, weekly, or monthly).

Examples:

  • Comparing to a daily baseline compares the current time at 16:00 to the average of the last X days at 16:00.
  • Comparing to a weekly baseline compares the current Tuesday 16:00 to the average of the last X Tuesdays at 16:00.
  • Comparing to a monthly baseline uses the last X instances of the same day of the month.

You can also trigger an alert when a scenario exceeds a fixed duration you set.

By default, these alerts are sent when the deviation occurs at least 15 times within a 25-minute window. They are marked as resolved once the deviation stops for at least 20 out of those 25 minutes.

Business data alerts​

Available by default on Business and Full licenses; optional on other plans.

Scenarios help detect many site issues, but it's difficult to cover every possible anomaly with a scenario. Business alerting monitors the impact (for example drops in traffic or conversion) rather than a predefined list of causes.

Business alerts detect abnormal drops in traffic or conversion and let you analyze precisely when those drops occurred.

Because this data comes from Google Analytics, it is processed with a default 4-hour delay (GA data is refined over time).

Conversion rate alerts​

This checks whether your conversion rate average over a given period (2 hours by default) is lower compared to the same period historically (daily, weekly, or monthly baselines).

By default this alert triggers when the conversion rate drops by 30% compared to the usual value. A resolution notification is sent when the metric returns to 75% of the usual conversion rate.

You can also set a fixed conversion-rate threshold below which you want to be alerted.

Page view alerts​

This works the same way as conversion-rate alerts but is applied to page views per minute.