Question

Your company runs a customer-facing payment API on Cloud Run. The operations team wants alerts routed differently based on severity: warning-level conditions should create a ticket in their incident management tool, while critical outages must page the on-call engineer immediately via SMS and PagerDuty. Currently all Cloud Monitoring alerting policies send email to a shared distribution list, and minor issues are being missed among the noise. What is the most appropriate way to implement tiered alert routing in Cloud Monitoring?

Accepted Answer

Create separate alerting policies for warning and critical conditions, and attach different notification channels (webhook to the ticketing tool for warnings; SMS and PagerDuty channels for critical) to each policy.

Answer

Keep a single alerting policy for all conditions and configure the shared email distribution list to filter messages into folders based on subject line.

Answer

Export all alert events to a Pub/Sub topic and write a Cloud Function that parses each message and forwards it to the correct destination based on custom logic.

Answer

Increase the alerting policy's duration threshold so that only sustained critical outages generate any notification, reducing the volume of minor alerts.