This document describes snoozes, which let you prevent Cloud Monitoring from creating alerts and issuing notifications during specific time periods. Alerts, also called incidents, record the violation of an alerting policy. You can create and manage your snoozes by using the Google Cloud console, the Google Cloud CLI, and the Cloud Monitoring API.
When to snooze notifications
Create a snooze when you want to temporarily prevent alerts from being created and notifications from being sent. For example, you might create a snooze in the following situations:
- You have an escalating outage and you want to reduce the number of new notifications.
- You plan a maintenance window.
- You have a maintenance window.
When you create the snooze, you specify a name, a time period, and the snooze criteria:
The name should describe the purpose of the snooze. For example, you might name a snooze "Maintenance window for Cloud SQL database".
The period determines when the snooze is active. It's specified by a start time and a duration. An active snooze prevents Monitoring from creating alerts and issuing notifications for policies that match the criteria of the snooze. Outside the active period, the snooze is inactive. An inactive snooze doesn't affect when alerts are created and notifications are sent.
The criteria determines the policies to which the snooze applies. You can apply a snooze to any alerting policy.
How snooze works
The following table describes the relationship between the status of a condition in a single-condition alerting policy and when incidents are created and notifications are sent:
| State | Action |
|---|---|
| Condition isn't triggered | Existing behavior When an incident is open, close it and send incident-closure notifications. |
| Condition is triggered and Policy isn't associated with an active snooze |
Existing behavior When an incident doesn't exist, create one and send notifications. |
| Condition is triggered and Policy is associated with an active snooze |
New behavior
|
When a snooze is associated with a policy that contains multiple conditions, the rules to combine the conditions are enforced first. Next, the rules associated with snoozes are applied.
How creating a snooze differs from disabling a policy
To prevent notifications from a collection of alerting policies for a short interval, you can manually disable each policy or you can create a snooze:
If you choose to manually disable the policies, then you must remember to manually enable each disabled policy at the end of the interval. Also, you can only schedule these actions if you use the Cloud Monitoring API and configure something to issue the API call at a specific time.
If you create a snooze, you can schedule the active period, and the snooze can apply to multiple alerting policies. When the snooze is inactive or when an active snooze ends, the alerting policies associated with the snooze behave normally. That is, these policies can create incidents and send notifications.
When you have periodic maintenance windows, for each window, you can manually disable and enable the alerting policies that shouldn't send notifications. However, if you create a snooze for one maintenance window, you can copy that snooze and update the start time and duration of the copy. That is, by creating one snooze and copying it, you can schedule a series of upcoming snoozes for the same collection of alerting policies.
To view a record of when alerting policies are disabled or enabled, you must query the Audit Logs of the Google Cloud project. However, when you create a snooze, that snooze is added to the historical record of snoozes for your Cloud project. You can view the historical record, which shows your past, active, and upcoming snoozes, by using the Google Cloud console.
Restrictions
The duration of a snooze must be a single interval that is a multiple of minutes.
A snooze can only be applied to 16 alerting policies.