Common Issues

This page describes how to resolve common problems you might encounter with Alerting.

Problem

Rules with a small check interval, such as every two seconds, run later than scheduled.

Solution

Rules run as background tasks at a cadence defined by their check interval. When a Rule check interval is smaller than the Task Manager poll_interval, the rule will run late.

Either tweak the Kibana Task Manager settings or increase the check interval of the rules in question.

For more details, see Tasks with small schedule intervals run late.

Problem

Scheduled rules run at an inconsistent cadence, often running late.

Actions run long after the status of a rule changes, sending a notification of the change too late.

Solution

Rules and actions run as background tasks by each Kibana instance at a default rate of ten tasks every three seconds. When diagnosing issues related to alerting, focus on the tasks that begin with alerting: and actions:.

Alerting tasks always begin with alerting:. For example, the alerting:.index-threshold tasks back the index threshold stack rule. Action tasks always begin with actions:. For example, the actions:.index tasks back the index action.

For more details on monitoring and diagnosing task execution in Task Manager, see Health monitoring.

Problem

When executing actions, a connector gets a TLS socket error when connecting to the server.

Solution

Configuration options are available to specialize connections to TLS servers, including ignoring server certificate validation, and providing certificate authority data to verify servers using custom certificates. For more details, see Action settings.

Problem

Rules are taking a long time to execute and are impacting the overall health of your deployment.

Solution

Query for a list of rule ids, bucketed by their execution times:

GET /.kibana-event-log*/_search
{
  "size": 0,
  "query": {
    "bool": {
      "filter": [
        {
          "range": {
            "@timestamp": {
              "gte": "now-1d", 
              "lte": "now"
            }
          }
        },
        {
          "term": {
            "event.action": {
              "value": "execute"
            }
          }
        },
        {
          "term": {
            "event.provider": {
              "value": "alerting" 
            }
          }
        }
      ]
    }
  },
  "runtime_mappings": { 
    "event.duration_in_seconds": {
      "type": "double",
      "script": {
        "source": "emit(doc['event.duration'].value / 1E9)"
      }
    }
  },
  "aggs": {
    "ruleIdsByExecutionDuration": {
      "histogram": {
        "field": "event.duration_in_seconds",
        "min_doc_count": 1,
        "interval": 1 
      },
      "aggs": {
        "ruleId": {
          "nested": {
            "path": "kibana.saved_objects"
          },
          "aggs": {
            "ruleId": {
              "terms": {
                "field": "kibana.saved_objects.id",
                "size": 10 
              }
            }
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

This query returns the following:

{
  "took" : 322,
  "timed_out" : false,
  "_shards" : {
    "total" : 1,
    "successful" : 1,
    "skipped" : 0,
    "failed" : 0
  },
  "hits" : {
    "total" : {
      "value" : 326,
      "relation" : "eq"
    },
    "max_score" : null,
    "hits" : [ ]
  },
  "aggregations" : {
    "ruleIdsByExecutionDuration" : {
      "buckets" : [
        {
          "key" : 0.0, 
          "doc_count" : 320,
          "ruleId" : {
            "doc_count" : 320,
            "ruleId" : {
              "doc_count_error_upper_bound" : 0,
              "sum_other_doc_count" : 0,
              "buckets" : [
                {
                  "key" : "1923ada0-a8f3-11eb-a04b-13d723cdfdc5",
                  "doc_count" : 140
                },
                {
                  "key" : "15415ecf-cdb0-4fef-950a-f824bd277fe4",
                  "doc_count" : 130
                },
                {
                  "key" : "dceeb5d0-6b41-11eb-802b-85b0c1bc8ba2",
                  "doc_count" : 50
                }
              ]
            }
          }
        },
        {
          "key" : 30.0, 
          "doc_count" : 6,
          "ruleId" : {
            "doc_count" : 6,
            "ruleId" : {
              "doc_count_error_upper_bound" : 0,
              "sum_other_doc_count" : 0,
              "buckets" : [
                {
                  "key" : "41893910-6bca-11eb-9e0d-85d233e3ee35",
                  "doc_count" : 6
                }
              ]
            }
          }
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

Use the Get Rule API to retrieve additional information about rules that take a long time to execute.

Problem:

The rule fails to execute and has an Unable to decrypt attribute "apiKey" error.

Solution:

This error happens when the xpack.encryptedSavedObjects.encryptionKey value used to create the rule does not match the value used during rule execution. Depending on the scenario, there are different ways to solve this problem: