How to alert on an event that normally happens once a day?

Question

I have a batch job that runs once per day.

At the end of the job I submit a meter metric with a count of the items processed.

I want to alert if one day this metric is not updated.

On http://metrics.librato.com the maximum time I can check "not reported for" when creating an alert is 60 minutes.

I thought maybe I can create a composite metric and take the avg rate of change over the past 24 hours, and alert if that reaches zero.

I've been trying:

derive(s("my.metric", "%", {function:"sum", period:"86400"}))

However it seems that, because I log only a single event, above quite small values of period (~250s) my rate of change simply drops to zero ...I guess the low frequency means my single value is completely lost by the sampling.

Maybe I am using the wrong tool for the job...

Is there a way to achieve this in Librato?

Answer 1

There currently is not a way to achieve this as composite metrics are subject to the 60 minute limitation of alerts as well (as of 5/15/2015). You may need to look into configuring the metric (or a similar metric) to report within the 60m time range if possible.