Build DigitalOcean monitoring alert policies for CPU, memory, disk, and load balancer metrics.
Last verified: May 2026
Build DigitalOcean monitoring alert policy configurations for CPU, memory, disk, bandwidth, and load balancer metrics with email and Slack notifications.
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alertsOutput will appear here...DigitalOcean Monitoring is the built-in metrics agent that ships with Droplets and reports CPU, memory, disk, load average, and bandwidth. The DO Monitoring Alert Builder produces alert policy definitions — metric, threshold, comparison operator, window, and notification destination — that fire when a Droplet exits its expected operating range. Output is Terraform `digitalocean_monitor_alert` ready and includes pre-tuned defaults for common scenarios.
The minimum window is 5 minutes — alerts fire when the metric crosses the threshold for at least the specified window, averaged over the metric's collection interval. Shorter windows are not supported and would mostly produce noise from transient spikes anyway.
DO Monitoring is free, built-in, and covers Droplet-level metrics with minimal setup. Prometheus is appropriate when you need application-level metrics, custom dimensions, complex aggregation rules, or long retention. Most teams run both: DO Monitoring for infrastructure-level alarms, Prometheus for application telemetry, and ship the alerts to the same destination.
A production database Droplet runs out of disk during a Black Friday sales weekend at 2am, taking the store offline for 40 minutes while on-call extends the volume. The retrospective points at missing alerts — DO Monitoring was reporting disk fill, but nobody had configured a policy. Using the builder you generate a full alert suite (disk > 80%, disk rate-of-change > 1% per hour, CPU > 85%, memory > 90%) targeted at the `prod` tag, apply to the entire fleet, and route to the on-call rotation. Next incident gets a warning two hours before impact.
The builder collects the alert name, metric type (cpu, memory, disk, bandwidth), comparison (greater than, less than), threshold, window, and notification destinations (email, Slack). It validates the metric against currently-supported DO Monitoring metrics and the window against the minimum allowed. Output is a `digitalocean_monitor_alert` Terraform resource with the targeted Droplets identified by tag, type, or ID list.
Set alerts on rate-of-change for slow-growing problems. A disk-full alert at 85% gives you maybe a few hours to act; an alert on '+5% disk per hour' catches a runaway log writer 12 hours earlier with the same urgency.
Use tags to target alerts. An alert that applies to all Droplets tagged `prod` automatically extends to new prod Droplets, while an alert keyed to specific Droplet IDs needs maintenance every time the fleet changes.
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