You monitor metrics to stay aware of data quality issues the metrics uncover. A monitor generates incidents when a metric value falls outside of normal thresholds, which you can set explicitly or by anomaly detection.

To monitor a metric takes three main steps:

Create the monitor
Train the monitor
Start monitoring

Create a monitor

When you create a monitor, you specify its metric and monitor type, and optionally add an alerting channel and set advanced detection settings.

Decide which monitor to use

Lightup supports four monitor types. Available monitors depend on the metric type, and you'll only see options that work with the metric you've chosen to monitor. You can create basic monitors quickly from Explorer. For more advanced monitors, start from the Monitors List.

Use Case	Monitor type	Start in
I know what metric values or changes are normal and want to set thresholds myself	Manual thresholds	Explorer Monitors List
I want Lightup to automatically determine what's normal and set thresholds for me	Value out of expectations	Explorer Monitors List
My metric values vary period over period, and I want to know when there's a sudden change	Sharp change	Monitors List
My metric values can vary a lot within shorter periods, and I want to know when the trend changes over longer periods of time	Slow burn trend change	Monitors List

Train a monitor

Training a monitor prepares it for identifying out-of-bounds metric values. If you enter manual thresholds, training takes very little time. Training anomaly detection monitors takes some time.

For help with settings, see the Train section of Monitor configuration.

Start monitoring

As soon as you save and train a monitor, it goes live and starts logging incidents from that moment forward unless you set a Backfill Incidents Starting date on the Define tab (for details, see Create a monitor manually).

To check the monitor and make sure it is detecting incidents as intended, you can preview the monitor.

Preview a monitor

Once you've configured, saved, and trained a monitor, you can preview it. Preview shows what the monitor would find without requiring it to be live. You can view sample data first to help you decide what date range to preview.