Meter Alerts enable you to monitor and manage your observability costs by creating alert rules for total spend, per-signal spend, or limits by dimensions such as service, environment, or ingestion key.
Why Set Up Meter Alerts?
- Prevent Budget Overruns: Receive notifications when costs approach or exceed your budgeted values.
- Monitor Signal Breakdown: Stay informed about which signals (logs, traces, metrics) or services are driving increased spend.
- Ensure Fair Usage: Prevent specific teams, services, or ingestion keys from consuming more than their allocated cost share.
Alert-Compatible Metrics
| Metric | Description |
|---|---|
signoz.meter.log.count | Total number of log records ingested |
signoz.meter.log.size | Total size of logs ingested (in bytes) |
signoz.meter.span.count | Total number of spans ingested |
signoz.meter.span.size | Total size of spans ingested (in bytes) |
signoz.meter.metric.datapoint.count | Number of metric datapoints ingested |
Metrics can be filtered or grouped by labels including service.name, deployment.environment, host.name, and signoz.workspace.key.id for granular and targeted alerting.
Setting Up a Meter Alert
1. Navigate to the Alerts Section
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Open your SigNoz UI and click on the Alerts tab from the sidebar.
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Click the + New Alert button.
Start by creating a new alert in SigNoz -
Choose Metric Based Alerts as the alert type.
2. Select Meter as Your Data Source
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In the signal or metric source dropdown, select
meterunder the Metrics signal type. -
From the metrics list, pick the relevant meter metric (such as
signoz.meter.log.sizefor total log size, orsignoz.meter.span.countfor span counts).
Choose 'meter' under Metrics to see cost-related metrics -
(Optional) Add filters or groupings using available labels (
service.name,deployment.environment,signoz.workspace.key.id, etc.) for targeted alerting at the service, environment, or workspace level.
3. Configure Alert Thresholds & Evaluation Window
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Define the condition for when the alert should trigger:
- Set a threshold (such as a cumulative log size over 1 GB).
- Choose the aggregation: For most cost/usage monitoring, select In Total to aggregate all values within the window.
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Set the evaluation window. You can choose between two modes:
- Rolling: Monitors data over a fixed time period that moves forward continuously. Rolling mode supports preset timeframes (Last 5 min, 10 min, 15 min, 30 min, 1 hr, 2 hr, 4 hr) as well as a Custom time range.
- Cumulative: Monitors data accumulated since a fixed starting point. Select Current Day for daily budgets or Current Month for monthly quota alerts.
Set up a cumulative window for billing-aligned alerts
4. Configure Notification Channels
- Attach notification channels (e.g., Email, Slack, PagerDuty) to receive real-time alerts. Channels are configured in Settings > Notification Channels.
5. Review & Save
- Give your alert a clear and descriptive name (e.g., "Daily Log Data Budget", "Prod Ingestion Key Quota Exceeded").
- Double-check your query conditions, filters, and notification preferences.
- Click Save to activate the alert.
Best Practices
- Align Alerts with Budgets: Set alert thresholds just below your actual budget limit to allow time for action.
- Review Regularly: Periodically review and adjust alert thresholds based on changing usage patterns.
Troubleshooting
- No Meter Data Shown: Ensure your query time range is larger than 1 hour. Meter data is aggregated hourly.
- No Alert Triggered: Confirm your condition and threshold accurately reflect the underlying metric's scale (bytes, records, spans, etc.).
- Mismatch with Billing Page? Meter data is displayed using the UTC time zone. Ensure you are comparing usage within the same UTC-aligned period.
Next Steps
- Alert Configuration Guide — Common cost monitoring scenarios.
- Metrics-Based Alerts — Full alert configuration reference.
- Notification Channels — Set up Slack, PagerDuty, Email, and other integrations.
