OpenSearch/x-pack/docs/en/watcher/gs-index.asciidoc

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[role="xpack"]
[[xpack-alerting]]
= Alerting on cluster and index events
[partintro]
--
You can watch for changes or anomalies in your data and perform the necessary
actions in response. For example, you might want to:
* Monitor social media as another way to detect failures in user-facing
automated systems like ATMs or ticketing systems. When the number of tweets
and posts in an area exceeds a threshold of significance, notify a service
technician.
* Monitor your infrastructure, tracking disk usage over time. Open a helpdesk
ticket when any servers are likely to run out of free space in the next few
days.
* Track network activity to detect malicious activity, and proactively change
firewall configuration to reject the malicious user.
* Monitor Elasticsearch, and send immediate notification to the system
administrator if nodes leave the cluster or query throughput exceeds an
expected range.
* Track application response times and if page-load time exceeds SLAs for more
than 5 minutes, open a helpdesk ticket. If SLAs are exceeded for an hour,
page the administrator on duty.
All of these use-cases share a few key properties:
* The relevant data or changes in data can be identified with a periodic
Elasticsearch query.
* The results of the query can be checked against a condition.
* One or more actions are taken if the condition is true -- an email is sent, a
3rd party system is notified, or the query results are stored.
[discrete]
=== How watches work
The {alert-features} provide an API for creating, managing and testing _watches_.
A watch describes a single alert and can contain multiple notification actions.
A watch is constructed from four simple building blocks:
Schedule:: A schedule for running a query and checking the condition.
Query:: The query to run as input to the condition. Watches
support the full Elasticsearch query language, including
aggregations.
Condition:: A condition that determines whether or not to execute the actions.
You can use simple conditions (always true), or use scripting for
more sophisticated scenarios.
Actions:: One or more actions, such as sending email, pushing data to
3rd party systems through a webhook, or indexing the results of
the query.
A full history of all watches is maintained in an Elasticsearch index. This
history keeps track of each time a watch is triggered and records the results
from the query, whether the condition was met, and what actions were taken.
--
include::getting-started.asciidoc[]