Once you have added monitors to your account you will want to set up alerts so you are notified depending on the metrics you are keeping track of. To view your alerts, navigate to the ‘Global Settings’ and you will see a list of all alerts you can set up.

The very first thing you will want to set up are the ‘Alert Delivery Groups’ – this allows you to separate the people who will receive specific alerts and can be as simple or as complicated as you would like. If you are unsure we would initially recommend setting up a ‘Critical’ and ‘Default’ group to separate primary users from secondary users. 

Sensitivity is automatically built into the delivery groups and will send out an alert if a monitor is failing consistently for your chosen time period (Predominantly Uptime). Once you have added the users you want into the group you can personalise how you want to be alerted. Email alerts will be turned on as standard, if you are adding SMS, Voice Call and Whatsapp notifications they cost alert credits however you are automatically allocated these every month (Contact your account manager in case you find you are running out).

We also realise that these methods might not be the most efficient method for alerting and offer multiple integrations with Slack, Teams, Opsgenie, PagerDuty, Splunk On-Call, Pushover, Webhooks, Zendesk and we are always adding more.

Uptime Rules

Uptime Rules can be applied to both ‘Websites’ and ‘Server’ monitors. Although Uptime is a very basic monitor it is also very important so we would recommend setting up a 1 min alert for your critical group and a 5 min alert incase members in the critical group are unavailable or just for increased visibility. 

Basic Recommendations 

1 Min Critical Alert – To identify immediate failures

5 min Alert – To provide further visibility if the issue persists

Assurance Rules

Assurance Rules are alerts which can essentially be set up and forgotten about until triggered.

The domain monitor can be set up based on expiry date for a range of time periods from the day the domain expires to 12 months from that date. You can also be notified based on changes to this date which can be particularly useful for larger teams. Domain hosting services usually have notifications built in as well as auto-renewal services however RapidSpike offers an extra level of security.

Redirect Monitor’s check that URL redirection is working correctly and setting up alerts will notify you in case the redirect has changed.

The Safe Browsing alerting will alert you based on changes to that monitor. The monitor looks at Google’s list of potentially unsafe sites and we can offer data if your site is identified as having Malware, Potentially Harmful Applications, Social Engineering, Unwanted Software, Threat Type Unspecified. 

The SSL alerting can be set up to alert you to expiry date and any changes that occur. This is similar to the domain alerting and can alert you from the day of expiry to a year prior to that date.

Basic Recommendations

Domain Alerting – 1 Month, 1 Week, 1 Day, Day Of Expiry (To Relevant Group)

Safe Browsing Alerting – Based on Changes (Critical Group)

SSL Alerting – 1 Month, 1 Week, 1 Day, Day Of Expiry (To Relevant Group)

User Journey Rules

If you have user journeys set up on your site there are many alerts you can set up in order to make the most of the tool. If you have a self-service journey it will be on your team to set everything up yourself. If you have a managed user journey, we will be alerted to any failures and can discuss anything specific you are tracking to ensure they are set up.

The first and arguably most important alert you will want to set up is when the journey fails. Journeys can fail for numerous reasons, identifying an issue with your site, change of selectors or potentially something else. 

The other rules that can be set up with regards to alerting will be beneficial for gathering data on specific aspects of your site. You can be notified based on DOM, Render and total load time to your exact conditions, whether that be greater or less than a time period for the entire journey or a step. You may also want to be alerted if an element is showing an error, certain file size or load time and can even go a step further with alerting based on a combination of element size and load time.

As you can see there are many options for alerting within user journeys and they will be very personal to your website’s needs.

Basic Recommendations

User Journey Failures – First Occurrence (Critical Group), After Three Occurrences (To Relevant Group)

Webpage Test rules

Webpage Test alerts can be set up to notify you when the monitor fails as well as more specific alerts for total load time and element error, size or load time. 

Basic Recommendations

Webpage Test Failure – First Occurrence (Critical Group)

Based On Total Load Time – A particularly long load time (To Relevant Group)

Google Lighthouse Rules

Google Lighthouse rules can be quite personalised particularly if you have multiple monitors running at the same time. You can select the region you are monitoring and select the device, Desktop, Mobile or both.

After you have set the data type you need to create the rule conditions and can be alerted depending on Performance, Accessibility, SEO, Best Practises and PWA. Again like other monitors you can be notified if the score goes above/below a specific level and depending on the occurrence.

Web Vitals Rules

Web Vitals are very important to how Google perceives your website, adding alerts is a great way to keep track. It doesn’t just have to monitor negative outcomes, you can also track improvements, especially if you are trying to reach a specific metric.

You can track a variety of metrics which we will outline here:

Core Web Vitals

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
• Max Potential First Input Delay (FID)
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Popular

• Speed Index
• Server Response Time (Aka TTFB)
• First CPU Idle
• First Contentful Paint
• First Meaningful Paint
• Total Blocking Time

Others

• Bootup Time
• DOM Size
• Estimated Input Latency
• Interactive
• Mainthread Work Breakdown
• Network RTT
• Network Server Latency

Real User Rules

If you have RUM set up on your account you might want to include some alerts in order to view and compare the data you are tracking. You can schedule the alert to check every 1, 3, 6, 12, 24 hours and can compare to a fixed value or the same time/date last week.

Within the rule conditions you can monitor, Visits (Requests), Total Load Time, Network Time, Server Time and brower time, either on the whole site or a specific page within your chosen parameter.

Security Rules

Security Rules are very simple, If you have Attack Detection enabled on your RapidSpike account you will receive a report detailing any vulnerabilities detected. If you wanted an alert in particular to an increase in Vulnerabilities you can set up an alert if we detect low (and above), medium (and above) or high vulnerabilities.

Maintenance Windows

Maintenance windows aren’t alerts, however they allow you to block out specific times of the day that you don’t want to track. This could be for example if you have scheduled work being completed at the same time or a period where new features/fixes are deployed. Having this window means you won’t have unnecessary alerts.