Understanding Applications
An application in Alert24 is a logical grouping of related services. It represents a product, system, or workload that your team owns and operates.
Applications answer a critical question during outages: "What's affected?" When a database goes down, knowing which applications depend on it helps you assess the blast radius immediately.
Why Applications Matter
Without applications, you have a flat list of services. That works when you have 3 services. When you have 30, you need structure.
Applications provide:
- Context — Group services by the product or system they support
- Impact assessment — Quickly see which products are affected during an incident
- Dependency tracking — Understand which services your application relies on
- Team alignment — Different teams often own different applications
Examples
Here are some common ways teams structure their applications:
SaaS Product
Customer Portal (Application)
├── Web Frontend
├── REST API
├── PostgreSQL Database
├── Redis Cache
└── Cloudflare CDN
E-Commerce Platform
Storefront (Application)
├── Website
├── Product API
├── Payment Processing (Stripe)
├── Order Management API
└── CDN
Internal Tools
Internal Dashboard (Application)
├── Admin Panel
├── Analytics API
├── Reporting Database
└── Authentication Service
Applications vs. Status Pages
Applications and status pages serve different purposes:
- Applications are internal organizational tools. They help your team understand service relationships and dependencies.
- Status Pages are customer-facing. They show the services your customers care about.
A single service can belong to multiple applications and appear on multiple status pages. For example, your authentication service might belong to both your "Customer Portal" application and your "Admin Dashboard" application, but only appear on your customer-facing status page.
Getting Started
Head to Creating Applications to learn how to set up your first application and add services to it.