---
title: "Monitors and Alerts"
description: "Use Monitors to decide when problems become issues, and Alerts to notify, ticket, and automate next steps when those issues match your rules."
url: https://docs.sentry.io/product/monitors-and-alerts/
---

# Monitors and Alerts

This feature is available only if you're in the [Early Adopter program](https://docs.sentry.io/organization/early-adopter-features.md). Features available to Early Adopters are still in-progress and may have bugs. We recognize the irony.

Sentry separates **what you detect** from **what you do about it**:

* [**Monitors**](https://docs.sentry.io/product/monitors-and-alerts/monitors.md) watch your application's health and behavior. There are default detectors that pull data from your SDK integration. Custom configurations like, cron schedules, HTTP uptime, metric thresholds on spans and custom metrics, can also be monitored. With Monitors, these signals are turned into **issues** when conditions are met.
* [**Alerts**](https://docs.sentry.io/product/monitors-and-alerts/alerts.md) run when **issues** match the triggers and filters you configure, and carry out **actions** like sending notifications via Slack, email, PagerDuty, or webhooks, or creating work items in Jira and similar tools.

Using both Monitors and Alerts gives you a path from signal → triageable issue → team workflow, without wiring every integration by hand for every edge case.

For a concise **Issues-centric** explanation (how this shows up in your triage flow), see [Monitors and Alerts](https://docs.sentry.io/product/issues/monitors-and-alerts.md). For **hands-on setup**, see [Creating an Alert](https://docs.sentry.io/product/monitors-and-alerts/alerts.md#creating-an-alert).

## [End-to-End Flow](https://docs.sentry.io/product/monitors-and-alerts.md#end-to-end-flow)

```mermaid
flowchart LR
  subgraph mon["Monitors"]
    direction LR
    M1[Listen for when to create issues]
  end
  subgraph iss["Issues"]
    direction LR
    I[Issue created or updated]
  end
  subgraph al["Alerts"]
    direction LR
    A[Triggers + filters + actions]
  end
  mon --> iss
  iss --> al
```

1. **Monitor** evaluates data on a schedule or on incoming events and decides whether to open or update an **issue**.
2. **Alert** rules listen for issue lifecycle and attribute changes (and can be limited to certain Monitors or projects).
3. When a rule matches, **actions** run: notify people, open tickets, call integrations.

## [Where to Go Next](https://docs.sentry.io/product/monitors-and-alerts.md#where-to-go-next)

| Goal                                                  | Documentation                                                                                               |
| ----------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Configure detectors (cron, uptime, metrics, defaults) | [Monitors](https://docs.sentry.io/product/monitors-and-alerts/monitors.md)                                  |
| Configure notifications, tickets, and webhooks        | [Alerts](https://docs.sentry.io/product/monitors-and-alerts/alerts.md)                                      |
| Sentry notifications (email, quota, and so on)        | [Notifications](https://docs.sentry.io/product/notifications.md)                                            |
| Reduce noise and choose thresholds                    | [Alerts Best Practices](https://docs.sentry.io/product/monitors-and-alerts/alerts.md#alerts-best-practices) |

## [Learn More](https://docs.sentry.io/product/monitors-and-alerts.md#learn-more)

* #### [Alerts](https://docs.sentry.io/product/monitors-and-alerts/alerts.md)

  Use Alerts to notify or take action on important issues.

* #### [Monitors](https://docs.sentry.io/product/monitors-and-alerts/monitors.md)

  Generate issues and trigger alerts by creating custom monitors to track errors, performance, and metrics.

## Pages in this section

- [Alerts](https://docs.sentry.io/product/monitors-and-alerts/alerts.md)
- [Monitors](https://docs.sentry.io/product/monitors-and-alerts/monitors.md)