What is alert de-duplication?

Alert de-duplication is one of the key features that Opsgenie provides to help reducing the number of alerts and to prevent alert fatigue. Because monitoring systems can be quite "chatty" by sending many events for the same problem and having to manage many alerts that were raised for the same or relevant source, de-duplication becomes crucial for many cases.

Opsgenie alerts can be de-duplicated using the "alias" field. The Alias field is a user-defined unique identifier for "open" alerts. The followings are the key rules to achieve de-duplication for an alert within Opsgenie:

• There can be at most one open alert with the same alias at any time.

• If any source attempts to create a new alert where there is an open alert with the given alias, the Count value of the open alert will be increased by one instead of creating another alert.

Each de-duplication event is added to the activity log of the de-duplicated alert by Opsgenie to make keeping track easier. Please note that the Count property and logging the de-duplication event stops after 100 occurrences; however, de-duplication still continues as long as the alert is not closed.

If an alert that matched the conditions and time restrictions of an Auto-Close Policy gets de-duplicated, auto-closing the alert will be postponed for the specified time of the policy.