Alerts

Alerts turn signal activity into notifications. When an alert fires, Laminar drops the notification into the in-app notification center and, if configured, sends it to Slack and email. Alerts live on the Signal they watch. Open the Signal, click the Settings tab, and select Alerts in the sidebar to see every alert for that Signal, create a new one, or connect Slack.

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Defaults on signal creation

Creating a new Signal in the UI auto-creates two alerts so you start receiving notifications immediately:

1. A New event alert on the new Signal, scoped to Critical severity, with skip similar events on by default.
2. A New cluster alert.

The alerts default to in-app notifications, and the Signal’s creator is subscribed by email. To change channels or route an alert to Slack, open the Signal’s Settings > Alerts section and edit it.

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Alert types

Each alert has one of two triggers:

• New event: fires when a new event is extracted for the selected Signal. Filter by severity and, optionally, skip semantically similar events.
• New cluster: fires when a new cluster is created for the selected Signal. Useful for spotting failure modes that did not exist yesterday.

Both trigger types are scoped to a single Signal. To cover multiple Signals, create one alert in each Signal’s Settings > Alerts section.

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Severity levels

New event alerts fire only on events whose severity is included in the alert’s severity set. Pick any combination of:

• Info: low-severity events. Useful for low-volume signals where every event is interesting.
• Warning: mid-severity events.
• Critical: the highest severity. This is the default for alerts auto-created with a Signal.

The severity of each individual event is set by the Signal’s extractor based on the Signal’s prompt. A good way to learn what each level looks like on your data is to inspect a few events on the Signal detail page.

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Output schema filters

New event alerts can narrow further than severity. Output schema filters only notify when an event’s extracted output matches the conditions you set. The available fields come straight from the Signal’s structured output schema, so an alert can fire on, say, error_type = "timeout" while ignoring every other error.

• Click Add filter to start a condition group, then Add condition to add more conditions within it.
• Conditions inside one group are AND-combined: all of them must match (the group header reads All conditions must match).
• Add more groups to OR them together: an event triggers the alert if it matches any one group.
• Field types follow the schema: numbers compare with =, >, <; booleans and enums offer their allowed values; strings match on substring.

With no filters, the alert fires on every matching event. If the Signal has no output fields, there is nothing to filter on and the section stays empty.

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Skip notifications for similar events

New event alerts have an optional Skip notifications for similar events toggle. When enabled, only the first event in a group of semantically similar events triggers a notification. Subsequent events in the same group are suppressed. Turn this on when a Signal fires often on repetitive cases (the same timeout loop, the same tool error) and you only want to know about new failure modes. Turn it off when every event is worth paging.

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Notification channels

Every alert posts to the in-app notification center by default. Alerts auto-created with a Signal also email the Signal’s creator. Slack and any additional email subscriptions are configured per alert.

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Slack

Slack messages contain the signal name, the extracted payload fields, and a link to the trace. Connect Slack once per workspace, from either place:

• Signal settings: the Slack card at the top of any Signal’s Settings > Alerts section. Click Connect to Slack and you land back on the same page after authorizing.
• Workspace settings: Settings > Integrations under Workspace settings. See Slack integration.

Both cards manage the same connection, and it covers every project in the workspace. Once Slack is connected, the alert form shows a Slack channels picker.

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Email

Email alerts go to the subscribed user’s address. Each user manages their own email subscription from the alert’s edit form.

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Create an alert

1. Open the Signal, click the Settings tab, select Alerts, and click + Alert.
2. Fill in the form. The alert is bound to the Signal you opened it from:
   • Name: a descriptive label (“Checkout failures, #eng-oncall”).
   • Trigger: New event or New cluster.
   • Severity (new-event alerts only): select among Info, Warning, Critical.
   • Output schema filters (new-event alerts only): optional conditions on the event’s output.
   • Skip notifications for similar events (new-event alerts only): on or off.
   • Below the conditions, a preview chart shows how often the alert would have fired recently so you can gauge the expected volume.
   • Email: toggle on to receive emails at your workspace email address.
   • Slack channels (once Slack is connected): pick one or more channels to post into and click Test to send a sample message.
3. Click Create. The alert is active immediately.

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Edit or delete

In the Signal’s Settings > Alerts section, click an alert card to open its edit form, or hover the card and click the trash icon to delete it. Edits take effect on the next matching event; deletes are immediate.

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Enable or disable an alert

Every alert card in the Signal’s Settings > Alerts section has a switch that turns the alert on or off in place. Turn it off to pause notifications without losing the alert’s configuration: the trigger, severity set, filters, and channels are all kept, and the card moves to a dimmed state with the switch off. Turn it back on and notifications resume on the next matching event. The same control is available as an Active switch at the top of the alert’s edit form. Disabling an alert only silences notifications. The Signal it watches keeps evaluating traces and producing events; to pause the Signal itself, use the Signal’s own Active switch.

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Reports vs Alerts

Alerts fire on individual signal events or new clusters. Reports send periodic summaries of signal activity across a workspace. Use alerts to page on things you need to see now; use reports to keep a daily or weekly pulse.

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Next steps