What Is Alert Deduplication?

Alert deduplication prevents the same active alert from being created over and over again.

Deduplication happens when an alert is received — before it's enriched and escalated. To configure that part of the journey, see Routing.

When we receive an alert payload, we look at its dedupKey.

• If another active alert already exists with the same dedupKey, we treat the new alert as a duplicate of that active alert.
• If no active alert exists with that dedupKey, we create a new alert.

In practice, this means repeated open / acknowledged notifications for the same issue are grouped together instead of creating multiple separate alerts.

<aside> 💡

Note that acknowledged alert will still group alerts with the same dedupKey and will not fire new notifications

</aside>

How It Works

Deduplication only applies while an alert is still active.

Example:

1. An alert is received with dedupKey = checkout-api:high-cpu
2. A new alert is created
3. Another open alert is received with the same dedupKey
4. No new alert is created because the first alert is still active

Once the original alert is resolved or closed, the same dedupKey can be used again for a future alert.

dedupKey vs Alert Lifecycle

dedupKey is used for grouping repeated open alerts.

It is not the same thing as the provider’s lifecycle identifier.

That means: