# Alerting and response

Create monitors, route alert notifications to the right people, work problems and cases, and track SLOs, on-call schedules and escalations in Tracix.

Know when something breaks and who is fixing it. Monitors watch your telemetry and raise alerts, notification policies send them to the right people, related alerts fold into one problem, and a case tracks the work until it is resolved.

- [Monitors and templates](https://tracix.io/docs/alerting/monitors): Watch metrics, logs, traces and devices, starting from a template

- [Notification channels](https://tracix.io/docs/alerting/notifications): Send alerts to Slack, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, a webhook or your email gateway

- [Problems and cases](https://tracix.io/docs/alerting/problems-and-cases): See related alerts as one problem and work it as a case

- [SLOs and on-call](https://tracix.io/docs/alerting/slos-and-on-call): Track error budgets and page the person on call

## How the pieces fit

| Step      | What happens                                                                                                               | Console page                                 |
| --------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------- |
| Watch     | A monitor evaluates a query for every entity it covers, such as each host or service.                                      | **Alerts › Monitors**                        |
| Alert     | When a threshold is crossed, the monitor opens an alert for that entity, and closes it when the value recovers.            | **Alerts › Alerts**                          |
| Notify    | The monitor's own channels and any matching notification policies deliver the alert.                                       | **Alerts › Channels**, **Alerts › Policies** |
| Correlate | Alerts on the same or related resources fold into one problem, with the changes that came before it.                       | **Alerts › Problems**                        |
| Respond   | A case tracks ownership and the timeline. An escalation policy pages each of its steps in turn until someone acknowledges. | **Alerts › Cases**, **Alerts › On-Call**     |

Every page above lives under **Alerts** in the console sidebar, with **SLOs**, **Downtimes**, **Anomaly detection**, **Correlation** and **Analytics** beside them.

## Before you begin

Monitors need data to watch. If your workspace is new, install a collector or instrument a service first:

- [Install the collector](https://tracix.io/docs/collect/collector/install): Hosts, logs, Kubernetes and network devices

- [Instrument an application](https://tracix.io/docs/collect/instrument/languages): Traces and metrics from OpenTelemetry SDKs