How to Set Up Your First Monitor

5 min read Getting Started

Monitors are the foundation of observability in Nova. They continuously evaluate metrics from your infrastructure and trigger alerts when conditions are met. This guide walks you through creating your first monitor.

Prerequisites

A Nova AI Ops account
At least one host with the Nova agent installed

Steps

Navigate to Monitors

From the Nova dashboard, click Monitors in the left sidebar, then click New Monitor.

Choose a monitor type

Select the type of monitor you want to create. Common options include:

Metric Monitor — track CPU, memory, disk, or custom metrics
Service Check — monitor HTTP endpoints or TCP ports
Log Monitor — alert on log patterns or error rates

For your first monitor, select Metric Monitor.

Define the metric query

Use the query builder to select a metric. For example, to monitor CPU usage:

avg:system.cpu.user{host:your-hostname} > 80

This triggers when average CPU usage exceeds 80% over the evaluation window.

Set alert conditions

Configure the thresholds for warning and critical states. For example:

Warning: CPU > 70% for 5 minutes
Critical: CPU > 90% for 5 minutes

Configure notifications

Choose who gets notified when the monitor triggers. You can notify via email, Slack, PagerDuty, or any configured integration.

Tip:

Start with a generous threshold and tighten it over time. This avoids alert fatigue while you learn your baseline metrics.

Save and verify

Click Create Monitor. Nova will immediately begin evaluating your metric. You can see the monitor's status on the Monitors overview page.

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