Set alert severity based on field value condition?

[matthewe25]

I have some field value 'foo' and I want to trigger an alert of a different severity depending on its value (e.g a low severity alert when foo > 10, a medium severity alert when foo > 20, and a high severity alert when foo > 50). I know that this is easy to do by creating separate alerts and changing the count condition and severity for each one, but this feels inefficient and will be a pain to go through and edit when the conditions change.

I'm new to Splunk so I'm not aware of a way to trigger an alert with a condition for its severity. Is this possible to achieve?

[jacobpevans · Accepted solution]

Greetings @matthewe25 ,

I know this isn't exactly what you want, but this might help you: https://community.splunk.com/t5/Alerting/Configure-an-alert-based-on-the-number-of-results-as-warnin...

As far as your actual question, I would test whether you can modify the savedsearches.conf file directly to try to set the severity to the same thing (e.g. $result.Criticality$) but try using numbers instead of words. It's a long shot, and it's definitely not documented, but that's the only way I can think of this working.

As you said in your post, this situation is normally handled by using separate alerts. One way to make them slightly more dynamic is to retrieve the thresholds from a lookup. If you do that, at least you won't have to touch the multiple alerts to modify the thresholds moving forward.