Meter Alerts - Set Up Observability Cost Alerts

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

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

• Open your SigNoz UI and click on the Alerts tab from the sidebar.

• Click the + New Alert button.

  

• Choose Metric Based Alerts as the alert type.

2. Select Meter as Your Data Source

• In the signal or metric source dropdown, select meter under the Metrics signal type.

• From the metrics list, pick the relevant meter metric (such as signoz.meter.log.size for total log size, or signoz.meter.span.count for span counts).

  

• (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

• 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.

• 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.
  Info

  Meter and billing data in SigNoz always use the UTC timezone. Align your alert windows with your organization's billing/reporting cycle, or use 'Current Month' for monthly quotas.

  

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.

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.