Honeycomb Triggers

Alayshia Knighten [Sr. Implementation Engineer]:

Hello everyone. My name is Alayshia Knighten, and today we’ll be discussing Honeycomb Triggers. Now, let’s beeline in. Before we begin, let’s take a moment to talk about triggers. So what are they? Triggers are Honeycomb’s primary mechanism for sending alerts. Triggers can send alerts to email, Slack, PagerDuty, or any generic Webhook. You can really make triggers from any visualized function except heatmap.

There are a few ways to create a new trigger. You can simply select triggers on the left-hand side. You can select “new trigger,” which you would then have to choose the data set and then select “make trigger.” You can also create a trigger from the query. So right now, I’m going to do a basic query. In the visualize, I’ll use count, and I’ll just run the query. Once I get the query, right next to share are three dots. I click on the dots and select “make a trigger.” Just note that if you have multiple visualizations, it will ask you to select the visualization you would like to make a trigger for.

Right now, I’m on the “define new trigger” page. Once there, I just simply give it a trigger name. We recommend that you have a simple name with a very detailed run book style description. As a tip, you can link a Wiki page that has runbook-like information in it. What if this trigger fires off in the middle of the night? While your eyes are still crusty, you do not want to think too much about finding information regarding what to do. So linking a Wiki straight into the description is always very useful. By default, the state is automatically enabled, but you can simply toggle to disable it.

At this point, you see that by default the query will run every 30 minutes. This is the query that I have here, which is just basically a count. It shows the graphical description of the count. We can then, at this point, change the threshold. Let’s just say, we’re looking for a count that is greater than or equal to 80,000. Of course, this is an example. If we scroll down at this point, we want to look at the frequency. We want this query to run every five minutes. For the duration, we’re basically saying, and this is how much data we want, which in this case, we’ll just say 10 minutes of data. From there, you can add recipients. To add a recipient, just click “add recipient.” Your options are to notify by email, by Slack channel, PagerDuty, Webhook, data set marker, et cetera.

In order to use the recipient, you must first have had it configured within the integration center. To get to the integration center, you can simply click on “integration center.” And from here, you can see all of your integrations. You can also test and edit them as well. So I’m just going to add a recipient, which is myself, and then I’m going to create the trigger. And here I can see my trigger. And if I want to, I can test that trigger or I can simply delete the trigger. And right now, I’m at a normal state. So I’m just going to go ahead and delete the trigger because I don’t need it, of course. Once again, I’m Alayshia Knighten with Honeycomb Triggers. As always, go beeline in.

If you see any typos in this text or have any questions, reach out to marketing@honeycomb.io.

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