An alert rule transformation is a way to change alert data before it arrives at your VictorOps timeline. Typing the name of an existing field into the rules engine’s ‘alert field’ box, allows you to overwrite that field with a new value of your choosing.

Transformation actions can also add entirely new fields to an alert.  This can be accomplished by simply typing the desired name of the field into the alert field section and assigning a value.

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Transformation Uses

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Changing the routing key

You can change the routing key of a particular set of alerts.  If you set up an integration to send all alerts to your Database team, but you want a particular subset of incidents related to a specific host (db03) to go to the Development team (routing_key = devs), try the following:

When entity_id matches *db03* using Wildcard Match

Set routing_key to devs

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Adding a new alert field

In order to add a new field to an alert, you must first create a matching condition. For example, if every time a certain monitoring tool sends an alert you’d like to add a new field, you would would create a matching condition that states:

When monitoring_tool matches your_tool using Wildcard Match

Add a new unique field to an alert by setting a new_field_name (or a name of your choosing), this will automatically create a new field. The value of the new field can be set anything you want. It would look similar to:

Set new_field_name to value of new field

If you’d like the value of the new field to dynamically pull the contents of an existing field, use this syntax ${{current_field_name}}.

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Muting Noisy Alerts

Some alerts can be distracting and cause unnecessary paging in your account. By transforming the message_type field to INFO these noisy alerts can be muted. You can create the matching condition for whatever field the noisy alerts have in common. For example, if the every time the state_message included the word spam you wanted the message_type to be INFO you would create the following rule:

When state_message matches *spam* using Wildcard match

Set message_type to INFO

Timestamp Based Muting

To leverage timestamps to mute or adjust alerts use the Regex method and a chained rule. We recommend scoping the rule with a chain to only affect alerts for a specific routing_key or monitoring_tool.

The following example will transform alerts to the teamA routing_key to INFO type on Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday UTC.

Rule 1:

When routing_key matches teamA using Wildcard

Set teamA to a new value ${{Alert_received_week_time_utc}}

Rule 2: 

When teamA matches \d*-W\d*-[467].* using RegEx

Set message_type to new value INFO

Our alert_received_week_time_utc field is a ISO8601 week date formatted timestamp. For example, 2020-W10-3TT17:38:32Z is the form YEAR-WEEK-DAY-TIME and the days are expressed 1-7 for Monday-Sunday. You may want to augment the example regular expression to account for timezone differences from UTC.

Below is an example of a rule that will only capture alerts that come in between 8 am and 12 pm UTC no matter the year, week, day of the week, or minutes of the hour. In the below case, we’re only wanting to capture alerts between 8 am and 12 pm UTC, for that reason, we’ve broken down the rule as follows:

When Alert_received_time_utc matches .*T(0[8-9]|1[0-1]):.*

Set message_type to INFO

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Change the Appearance of Incidents and Notifications

By using variable expansion and transformations, you can alter alert fields. An example is changing the display name on an alert card. The display name field is called the entity_display_name. If you’d like to change this field to display another field, you would configure a rule like the following:

When entity_display_name matches * using Wildcard

Set entity_display_name to ${{field_you_choose}}

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Combining Multiple Different Alerts Into One Single Incident

To aggregate multiple alerts into one single incident, first find a value to match which associates multiple different incidents. Then, transform the entity_id field to a set value. By pre-determining the entity_id, VictorOps will automatically aggregate the alerts.

When entity_id matches disk* using Wildcard Match

Set entity_id to Disk Problems

This rule will take any alert that has an entity_id that starts with disk and transform the entity_id to Disk Problems.

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Transform/Create fields with RegEx

When dealing with text, there may be information you want to extract via RegEx capture groups. By using RegEx capture groups (contained in parenthesis( ) ), you can add new alert fields or transform existing ones. This is similar to using wildcard matching.

In this example, we use RegEx to look for “error” or “ERROR” in the subject field, then set the message_type to INFO as above to mute the noisy alert.

When subject matches ^((?!error|ERROR).)*$ using RegEx

Set message_type to INFO

For additional information on how to annotate alerts, see this article.

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For help with AND/OR logic, see this article.