Custom Alerts

Custom Alerts

Overview

Custom Alerts extend WISdom's built-in monitoring by letting you define your own alert conditions using T-SQL queries tailored to your environment. Whether you need to track AlwaysOn replication lag, monitor disk space on specific drives, or flag unusual login activity, Custom Alerts give you full control over what to monitor, when to alert, and what message your team sees.

Once configured, Custom Alerts appear in dashboards, can be assigned to Alert Profiles and Rules, and follow the same alert lifecycle as any built-in alert type.

Permissions required to configure custom alerts: Access to Admin Console → Monitoring

How Custom Alerts Work

Custom Alerts are built on two components that work together:

• Custom Monitoring Queries – T-SQL queries that WISdom runs against your monitored instances to collect the data you want to watch.
• Custom Alerts – Alert types that reference a validated query, apply a threshold and tolerance, and generate alerts that behave just like standard WISdom alerts.

The workflow at a glance

1. Write a query – Create a Custom Monitoring Query with read-only T-SQL that returns the data you want to monitor. Select which instances the query should run against.

2. Validate the query – WISdom runs the query against a target instance to confirm it executes successfully, returns a usable result set, and is safe to run on an ongoing basis. Only validated queries can be used by Custom Alerts.

3. Create an alert – Build a Custom Alert that references your validated query. Map the query's result columns to tell WISdom which column is the value to monitor and which column identifies the object (such as a database or disk).

4. Set conditions – Choose a comparison operator and threshold that define the alerting condition. Configure a tolerance duration so the condition must persist before the alert fires, helping reduce noise from brief spikes.

5. Define the message – Write a message template using placeholders that WISdom fills in at runtime, so your team sees exactly what triggered the alert and at what level.

6. Assign and monitor – Add the Custom Alert to your Alert Profiles, Rules, and Silencing Windows. From this point on, WISdom evaluates and manages the alert automatically alongside your standard alerts.

When to Use Custom Alerts

Custom Alerts are a good fit when you need to monitor a condition that is not covered by WISdom's standard alert types. Common use cases include:

• Replication health – Track redo queue sizes, log send rates, or synchronization delays across AlwaysOn Availability Groups.
• Capacity monitoring – Watch for databases approaching size limits, tempdb growth, or log file usage on specific instances.
• Environment-specific checks – Monitor conditions unique to your setup, such as custom application tables, job failure patterns, or configuration drift.
• Compliance and policy – Flag conditions like disabled auditing, unexpected permission changes, or accounts with expiring passwords.

If a standard WISdom alert already covers your use case, there is no need to create a custom version. Custom Alerts are designed to fill the gaps.

In This Section

• Custom Monitoring Queries – How to create, validate, and manage the T-SQL queries that power your Custom Alerts.
• Creating Custom Alerts – How to create alert types from your queries, configure thresholds and tolerances, and manage alerts across your environment.