While migrating your observability stack from Datadog to SigNoz, you'll need to recreate your alerts in SigNoz's alert management system.
Prerequisites
- A SigNoz account (SigNoz Cloud or Self-Hosted).
- List of existing monitors and notification channels from Datadog.
- Data flowing to SigNoz (metrics, traces, or logs depending on your alerts).
Migration Steps
Setting Up Notification Channels
Before migrating your alerts, set up the notification channels you want to use.
Supported Notification Channels
Below is a list of notification channels supported by Datadog and SigNoz:
| Notification Channel | Datadog | SigNoz |
|---|---|---|
| ✓ | ✓ | |
| Slack | ✓ | ✓ |
| Microsoft Teams | ✓ | ✓ |
| PagerDuty | ✓ | ✓ |
| OpsGenie | ✓ | ✓ |
| Webhook | ✓ | ✓ |
| Incident.io | Via Webhook | ✓ (via Webhook) |
| Rootly | Via Webhook | ✓ (via Webhook) |
| Zenduty | Via Webhook | ✓ (via Webhook) |
| ServiceNow | ✓ | Via Webhook |
| Jira | ✓ | Via Webhook |
| AWS SNS | ✓ | Via Webhook |
| VictorOps/Splunk | ✓ | Via Webhook |
If the notification channel you need is not listed, you can use the Webhook channel to integrate with other tools.
For detailed setup instructions, see the Alerts Notification Channel documentation.
Setting Up Alert Rules
SigNoz provides a comprehensive alert management system. Migrate your existing Datadog monitors by mapping them to the corresponding alert types in SigNoz:
Alert Rule Mapping
| Datadog Monitor Type | SigNoz Alert Type | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Metric Monitor | Metric Alert | Convert Datadog query to PromQL |
| Log Monitor | Log Alert | Use Query Builder to recreate log filters |
| APM Monitor (Trace Analytics) | Trace Alert | Alert on latency, error rates, or span attributes |
| Anomaly Monitor | Anomaly Alert | Detects deviations without static thresholds |
| Composite Monitor | Multiple Alerts | Create separate alerts, consider using labels for grouping |
| Forecast Monitor | - | Not currently supported |
| Outlier Monitor | - | Not currently supported |
| Watchdog Monitor | - | Use Anomaly Alert as alternative |
Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)
If you define alert rules as code in Datadog (using the Datadog Terraform provider), you can continue using the same approach with SigNoz.
Use the SigNoz Terraform Provider to manage your alerts and notification channels programmatically.
Validate
To confirm that your alerts are migrated correctly:
- Test alerts by temporarily lowering thresholds or triggering test conditions.
- Verify that notifications are sent to the configured channels.
- Monitor for any missed alerts during the transition period.
Troubleshooting
Alerts not triggering
- Check Data: Ensure that the data (metrics, logs, traces) required for the alert is being received by SigNoz.
- Verify Query: Use the Query Builder to verify that your alert query returns the expected values.
- Check Thresholds: Ensure that the threshold conditions are met by your current data.
- Evaluation Interval: Check the evaluation interval and ensure the condition persists long enough to trigger the alert.
- Metric Names: Verify you're using OpenTelemetry metric names, not Datadog names.
Notifications not received
- Test Channel: Use the "Test" button in the alert channel configuration to verify connectivity.
- Check Spam Folder: If using email, check your spam folder.
- Verify Webhook URL: If using webhooks, ensure the URL is correct and accessible from the SigNoz instance.
- Check Network: For self-hosted, ensure SigNoz can reach external notification services.
Query errors in alerts
- Validate PromQL: Test your PromQL query in the Metrics Explorer first.
- Check attribute names: Ensure you're using OpenTelemetry attribute naming conventions.
- Verify metric availability: Confirm the metric exists in your SigNoz instance.
Alert too noisy/quiet
- Adjust thresholds: Fine-tune thresholds based on your SigNoz data patterns.
- Modify evaluation window: Increase evaluation window to reduce noise.
- Add filters: Add more specific filters to reduce alert scope.
