Monitoringrule

Monitoringrule, in a general sense, is a configuration artifact used by monitoring systems to define evaluation logic for telemetry data and to control when and how alerts are generated. A monitoring rule typically expresses a query or expression that evaluates time-series data, an evaluation interval that determines how often the rule is checked, and optional duration fields that require a condition to be true for a certain period before triggering an action. Rules may also carry metadata such as labels for categorization and annotations that provide human-readable descriptions.

Most systems distinguish at least two kinds of monitoring rules: alerting rules, which trigger notifications when a condition is met, and recording rules, which compute and store derived metrics to improve query performance or simplify downstream dashboards. In practice, a rule is grouped with others in a rule file or rule set and is evaluated by a rule engine at the specified interval.

Common fields include the rule name, the query or expression, the evaluation frequency, for-duration, labels, and annotations. For alerting rules, additional fields specify the alert name, severity, and routing targets. Rules are typically managed as code, version-controlled, and deployed as part of a monitoring deployment, enabling reproducibility and safe rollouts.

See also: alerting, rule engine, Prometheus, Kubernetes, observability, incident management.