> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.honeyhive.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Creating Alerts

> Step-by-step guide to creating alerts that monitor your AI application's performance, quality, and cost metrics.

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  <img src="https://mintcdn.com/honeyhiveai/qmpHooEVX6j-ieIE/images/alert-creation.png?fit=max&auto=format&n=qmpHooEVX6j-ieIE&q=85&s=795165b0cda4fd75c680471afd37bf7a" alt="Alert creation interface" width="3024" height="1568" data-path="images/alert-creation.png" />
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This guide walks you through creating an alert. For an overview of alert types, states, and management actions, see [Alerts Overview](/v2/monitoring/alerts/alerts_overview).

## Create an Alert

<Steps>
  <Step title="Name and describe your alert">
    Give your alert a clear name and description so your team knows what it monitors.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Choose monitoring frequency">
    Select how often to evaluate your alert:

    * **Hourly**: Checked every hour for immediate detection
    * **Daily**: Checked every hour but evaluated over daily periods
    * **Weekly**: Checked daily but evaluated over weekly periods
    * **Monthly**: Checked daily but evaluated over monthly periods

    *Note: More frequent checking means faster detection, even for longer evaluation periods.*
  </Step>

  <Step title="Select what to monitor">
    **Event Type**: Choose the data source for your alert

    * **Models**: Individual LLM API calls and completions
    * **Sessions**: Complete user conversations or workflows
    * **Tools**: Function calls and external integrations
    * **Chains**: Multi-step workflows and complex pipelines

    **Event Filters**: Narrow down to specific segments (optional)

    * Filter by event name, tenant, or any custom metadata
    * Example: Only monitor production traffic or specific model versions
  </Step>

  <Step title="Define the metric and aggregation">
    **Metric**: What to measure. The available metrics depend on the event type you selected:

    For **Models**, **Tools**, and **Chains**:

    * `duration` - Span latency
    * `metadata.*` - Any metadata field (e.g., `metadata.total_tokens`, `metadata.cost`)
    * `metrics.*` - Any custom metric or evaluator score (e.g., `metrics.faithfulness`, `metrics.relevance`)
    * `event_id` - Event count (use with COUNT aggregation)

    For **Sessions**, you can alert on aggregate fields computed across all child spans in the session:

    * `duration` - Total session wall-clock duration
    * `metadata.cost` - Total cost across all LLM calls in the session
    * `metadata.total_tokens` - Total tokens (prompt + completion) across the session
    * `metadata.prompt_tokens` - Total prompt tokens across the session
    * `metadata.completion_tokens` - Total completion tokens across the session
    * `metadata.num_events` - Number of child spans in the session
    * `metadata.num_model_events` - Number of LLM call spans in the session
    * `metadata.has_feedback` - Boolean indicating whether the session has received user feedback

    **Aggregation**: How to summarize the data

    * **COUNT**: Total number of events
    * **AVERAGE**: Mean value across events
    * **P90/P95/P99**: Percentile values for performance monitoring
    * **SUM**: Total of all values
    * **MIN/MAX**: Extreme values
    * **MEDIAN**: Middle value
  </Step>

  <Step title="Set alert thresholds">
    **Alert Type**: Choose between aggregate alerts (absolute thresholds) or drift alerts (relative change detection)

    **Trigger Threshold**: The value that triggers the alert

    * Aggregate example: "Average latency > 2 seconds"
    * Drift example: "25% worse than previous period"

    **Resolution Threshold**: When the alert auto-resolves (defaults to the inverse of your trigger threshold)
  </Step>

  <Step title="Configure notifications">
    * **Channel**: Email is available by default. **Slack** (via incoming webhook) and **Webhook** (HTTP endpoint) channels are also supported - self-hosted customers can enable them via environment variables, and cloud customers can [contact us](mailto:support@honeyhive.ai) to get them enabled.
    * **Recipients**: Choose specific team members or notify all project members

    Notifications include the metric value that triggered the alert and a direct link to investigate.
  </Step>
</Steps>

## Next Steps

Once your alert is created, you can manage it from the alerts page. See [Alerts Overview](/v2/monitoring/alerts/alerts_overview) for details on alert states and actions like pausing, muting, and resolving alerts.