By means of Francesca Brzoskowski.

When it comes to monitoring and alerting within the Elastic Stack, two features stand out: Alerting and Watcher. Both are designed to automate searches, track data changes, and ensure your system remains efficient and reliable. Whether you’re a data engineer, DevOps professional, or an AI and search enthusiast, understanding these tools is essential to keeping systems running smoothly and resolving issues before they escalate.

Automate your search and data analysis

Effective server monitoring and logging goes beyond just collecting data. It’s about detecting anomalies and ensuring system stability in real-time. With Alerting and Watcher you can:

🔍 Detect and respond to critical system changes – such as an unexpected CPU spike, memory overload, disk I/O problems, or an application error.

🤖 Automate log monitoring and anomaly detection – by setting up notifications for error logs, slow response times, unauthorized access attempts, or abnormal traffic patterns. This ensures optimal security and performance.

⚙️ Streamlining Incident Response – by automating actions that notify teams, launch scripts, or execute recovery processes before small issues become major outages.

✨ Improve search and monitoring efficiency – by using automated insights to track KPIs and reduce manual intervention.

Which tool best suits your situation?

Two important factors determine whether Alerting or Watcher is the best choice for your monitoring:

1. The level of automation you need.
2. The level of customization you want to apply.

Let's look at the differences in detail.

Alerting: Built-in assistant for real-time monitoring

Think of Alerting as your always-on assistant. It monitors key performance indicators and alerts you when something needs attention. Integrated into Kibana, Alerting provides a simple, code-free way to set up monitoring rules and actions – ideal for fast and efficient monitoring.

Why choose Alerting?

✅ User-friendly interface – Kibana UI allows you to easily set up notifications without any programming knowledge.

✅ Preset actions – Send notifications via Slack, Teams, email, and other pre-configured connectors in just a few clicks.

✅ Ideal for basic surveillance – Easily track changes such as CPU spikes, system crashes or search performance without complicated configurations.

💡 When the conditions of a rule are met, a notification is triggered. If the rule has an action, it will be executed at the set frequency.

Practical Scenario: Automating Anomaly Detection

Imagine your server’s CPU usage suddenly spikes to 95%. Without automatic monitoring, this could go unnoticed and lead to serious performance issues. With Alerting, you can set up a rule to monitor CPU usage. Once it exceeds 95%, you’ll receive an instant notification via email or Microsoft Teams, so you can fix the issue before it affects users.

Watcher: Advanced automation for complex environments

While Alerting is perfect for fast, intuitive monitoring, Watcher is the solution for users who require deep customization, multi-step automation, and complex alerting workflows. Watcher uses JSON-based scripts, making it ideal for environments that require detailed monitoring and automated responses.

💡 You can think of Watcher as the more advanced version of Alerting, with more precision, control and capabilities for complex scenarios.

Why choose Watcher?

✅ Extensive customizability – Set detailed conditions and responses with JSON scripting for fully customized notifications.

✅ Scheduled monitoring – Define notifications to trigger at specific times or intervals for proactive management.

✅ Workflow automation – Combine multiple rules, inputs and actions into a comprehensive monitoring workflow.

✅ Precise control – Monitor logs, searches, and system performance or perform automatic recovery actions without manual intervention.

Practical Scenario: Automating Server Monitoring with Watcher

Imagine you are managing a high traffic web application where CPU spikes, memory leaks or slow response times can impact performance. With Watcher you can:

📌 Monitor combinations of key server metrics such as CPU usage, memory, and API latency.

📌 Run a script to restart a stuck service or enable additional resources when thresholds are exceeded.

📌 Only alert your team when truly needed, reducing unnecessary notifications and enabling rapid intervention.

Bonus case scenario: Automating search performance

Imagine you are monitoring search relevance in a government knowledge base. If search accuracy drops below 80%, Watcher can:

📌 Log the searches involved for analysis.

📌 Run a script to retrain the search model and improve accuracy.

📌 Engineers warn to investigate indexing issues.

Choosing between Alerting and Watcher

The table below will help you choose the right tool:

Final considerations

Both Alerting and Watcher play a crucial role in monitoring your search infrastructure and system performance.

📝 Alerting provides a quick and easy way to set up notifications, ideal for basic monitoring.
📝 Watcher takes automation to the next level, with advanced scripting, workflow automation, and intelligent search optimization.

Whether you're monitoring search performance, data pipelines, or infrastructure health, Elastic Stack gives you the right tools to get the insights you need – at the right time.

Ready to optimize your monitoring strategy?

Whether you choose the simple efficiency of Alerting or the advanced automation of Watcher, the right tool can make all the difference in your Elastic Stack environment. Want to learn more about how to use these tools effectively for your organization? Contact us Contact Contact us for advice or find out how we can help you set up a powerful monitoring solution.