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URL: https://docs.datadoghq.com/monitors/notify/notification_rules/

⇱ Notification Rules

For AI agents: A markdown version of this page is available at https://docs.datadoghq.com/monitors/notify/notification_rules.md. A documentation index is available at /llms.txt.

Notification Rules

Overview

Monitor notification rules are predefined sets of conditions that automate the process of alerting your team based on tags and rule logic. Instead of individually configuring recipients for every monitor, notification rules let you define once and automatically route all monitor notifications whose notification tagset matches the rule’s scope.

There is a default limit of 1000 rules per organization..

Setup

You must have the monitor_config_policy_write permission to create a rule.

To create a Monitor Notification Rule in Datadog, do the following:

  1. Go to Notification Rules.
  2. Click New Rule.
  3. Configure the scope: Define the required tags for a monitor notification to be routed to this rule.
  4. Configure the routing and recipients: Choose how to route notifications and specify recipients.
  5. Add a clear and identifiable rule name.

Configure the scope

Add the required tags for a monitor notification to be routed to this rule. Matching evaluates the notification tagset. Learn more in How matching works.

Monitors created or updated after the notification rule is saved are routed to the defined recipients if it matches the scope of the rule.

Configure the routing and recipients

Choose how to route notifications when a monitor alert matches the rule’s scope. You can manually specify recipients or use dynamic routing to resolve recipients automatically from your team and service configurations.

Manual routing

Specify which recipients to notify when a monitor notification matches the rule’s scope. You can always notify all recipients, or set conditional recipients that are only notified when certain conditions are met (for example, route critical alerts to your on-call recipient, and send warnings to a Slack channel). Conditions can be based on monitor status or tags:

  • Status-based conditions: Notify recipients when the monitor transitions to a specific status (Alert, OK, Warn, or No data).
  • Tag-based conditions: Notify recipients when a specific tag key has a given value (for example, env:prod). Each condition supports only one tag key.

Notifications can be sent to email or any integration channel. There is a limit of 50 notification recipients per rule. For more information, see Notifications.

Dynamic routing

Dynamic routing is in Preview. To request access, contact your Datadog account team or reach out to Datadog Support.

Dynamic routing automatically routes monitor alerts to the right team based on your existing Teams and Catalog configurations. Instead of maintaining static recipient lists, dynamic routing uses the service or team tag on the alerting monitor to determine where to send notifications.

ConfigurationDescriptionRequirements
Service-basedChecks the monitor’s service tag or group tag, looks up which team manages that service in the Catalog, then sends the alert to that team’s configured notification channels.The service must have a team assigned in the Catalog. If no team is assigned, the alert falls back to the fallback recipients.
Team-basedDirectly checks the monitor’s team tag or group tag, then sends the alert to that team’s configured notification channels.The monitor must have a team tag.
FallbackIf routing cannot resolve (for example, the service has no team assigned or the team has no notification channels configured), the alert goes to the fallback recipients. Fallback recipients behave the same as manual routing recipients.Required for all dynamic routing rules.

Both Service-based and Team-based routing support Slack, email, PagerDuty, and Microsoft Teams. Teams can configure their notification channels in Teams settings.

Managing notification rules

From Monitor Settings

The Monitor Notification Rules page displays a table of all your notification rules with the following columns:

  • Name: Notification rule name
  • Scope: Shows the tag combinations that define when this rule applies (for example, team:shopist service:web-store env:prod).
  • Team: Lists the teams that this notification rule is associated with (available only when the team tag is added in the scope)
  • Coverage: Shows the number of monitors that match this rule’s scopes. Use this to verify rule coverage and identify rules that need adjustment.
  • Notifies: Lists the notification channels (such as Slack or email) that will receive alerts when this rule matches.

Additionally, you can click the vertical three-dot menu on the notification rule to Edit or Delete.

From an individual monitor

In your monitor configuration, the Recipient Summary shows recipients that are applied to the monitor by matching notification rules. On the Monitor edit page, you may also see rules that could match when new groups report (multi alert monitors). The Monitor status page shows rules that match.

How matching works

  • Notification tagset is the union of monitor tags and tags of the firing group (for multi alert monitors). If a key has multiple values across monitor/group, all values are considered.
  • Currently matches: A rule matches if at least one reporting group, combined with monitor tags, satisfies the scope; or, if the monitor tags alone do. NOT is evaluated per candidate tagset, so a group with a denied value does not match.
  • Could match when new groups report (multi alert monitors, Monitor edit surface): Treat each group-by key as present with any value, constrained by the monitor query’s allow/deny filters.
  • If multiple rules match a single notification, recipients from all matching rules are merged and de-duplicated.

Further reading