Notifications Best Practices

Overview

Designing notifications is key to ensure your data quality alerts get treated efficiently.

Make sure to pick the appropriate channels depending on the severity of your monitor: if your teams are usually more reactive on Slack or MS Teams, you probably want to have your monitors with the highest severity notify over there and keep emails for the least critical monitors.
Be mindful of single points of failure: notifying a single person over email is nice as it gives clear ownership, but you should also account for cases where the usual owner of a monitor/data asset might be out: somebody else on the team needs to be able to see the alert and react accordingly if needed.
Notifications are not only useful to let data owners that something needs to be fixed, they can also allow you to give visibility to data consumers about the health of upstream pipelines.

Make sure to enrich your notification message with the context required to simplify troubleshooting. You can therefore include the below information to your notifications:
- Debugging guidelines
- Internal documentation links
- Etc.