Netdata has an incredibly powerful alerting engine. But this can sometimes be a double-edged sword: the flexibility to build incredibly specific, intelligent alerts is immense, but mastering its syntax can feel like learning a new language. We’ve heard this from so many of you. You tell us that configuring alerts is often the steepest part of the learning curve, a task that falls to the one “Netdata expert” on the team who has spent the time digging through the documentation.
That’s a bottleneck we’re no longer willing to accept. Effective monitoring is a team sport, and everyone on call should be empowered to create the alerts they need, when they need them.
So, our team set out with a simple question: What if we could build a bridge between your intent and our syntax? What if you could just describe the condition you wanted to watch, and we could handle the rest?
Today, I’m happy to announce that we’ve built that bridge. You can now create alert configurations using natural language prompts, access an english explanation of any existing alert and even ask Netdata AI to suggest what would be an ideal alert for a given metric or chart or use-case.
Netdata AI is about making the Netdata experience faster, better and more enjoyable. For a little while now users have had the ability to automatically troubleshoot alerts with Netdata AI solving one of the main time consuming parts of the alerts workflow and now we’re tackling the other part of this which is creating the right kind of alerts. We hope that these new AI capabilities integrated directly into the alert configuration workflow will act as your expert partner, helping you create, understand, and discover alerts using natural language.
Creating production-ready alerts
I think the most frustrating experience with any tool is staring at a blank configuration file, knowing what you want to achieve but not knowing where to start. We wanted to eliminate that moment completely.
Now, instead of reaching for the documentation, you can simply describe your goal in plain English. For example, if you want to get ahead of a disk filling up, you can now just ask:
“Create an alert that warns me when a disk will be more than 85% full in the next 24 hours, and goes critical if it will be more than 95% full.”
Netdata AI will translate that request into a perfectly formatted, syntactically correct alert definition and present it for your review. It handles the business logic, the thresholds, and the templating for you.
Suggest what to alert on and discover the “Unknown Unknowns”
But what about the problems you don’t yet know to look for? For any given service or metric, what are the golden signals you should be watching?
This is where tribal knowledge often comes into play. We wanted to encode that SRE expertise directly into the product. You can now ask Netdata AI for intelligent suggestions based on the context of your infrastructure.
Netdata AI will suggest what would be a suitable alert for a specific use-case or context. It’s like having a senior SRE on your team, guiding you toward a more robust and effective monitoring setup.
Explain what every alert does, no more black boxes
Finally, we wanted to bring clarity to your existing alerts (and any new alert your team creates). Netdata ships with hundreds of pre-configured alerts, and while they’re incredibly useful, their underlying logic can sometimes feel like a black box.
Now, you can click on any alert definition—whether it’s one of ours or one you wrote six months ago—and ask Netdata AI to Explain this alert. It will break down the entire definition line by line: what it’s checking, how it’s calculating the values, and what the thresholds mean in plain language. This brings a new level of transparency and confidence to your entire alerting library.
AI credits consumption
Just like other Netdata AI functionality, usage is based on AI credits. Reminder: you get 10 monthly complementary credits while on a business subscription, and you can top-up credits yourself based on your needs. You also get 10 free credits on the free trial to experiment with.
Alert creation and alert suggestion consume 0.2 credits per run, which meanas you can create (or suggest) up to 5 alerts per AI credit.
Alert explanation is free to use.
We’re just getting started
By letting Netdata AI handle the syntactic complexity, we’re lowering the barrier to entry for effective alerting and freeing up your team to focus on what matters: building reliable, high-performance systems.
This is the next step in our journey to make sophisticated observability simple and accessible for everyone. And we’re just getting started! there are more improvements and enhancements to Netdata alerting that are headed your way.
You’ll find these new AI capabilities directly within the alert configuration workflow in Netdata Cloud, you can trigger them by clicking on the alert bell icon that’s part of every chart OR by clicking on “New Alert” from the alerts tab (Of course you always have the option to use the more manual dynamic configuration alert wizard which gives you full control). This feature is available today for all users on a Business plan or a free trial.
Give it a try, and let us know what you think.