Customize velocity alerts

Use velocity alerts to notify your team when any individual issue is causing an urgent problem in your app. For Crashlytics, an issue is a grouping of similar crashes.

What triggers an alert?

Velocity alerts are triggered when an issue in your app crosses a threshold that you define in the Firebase console.

You define the threshold for velocity alerts in terms of a percentage of user sessions that were impacted by a crash. You can set a threshold value between 0.1% and 1% of sessions. By default, the velocity alert threshold is set at 1% of sessions.

Specifically, an alert is triggered if, during a one-hour time period, the following are true:

  • An issue in an app exceeds the defined threshold for that app.
  • The app has 250 sessions in that time period.
  • There was no alert previously raised for the issue in the app.

Update the alert threshold

To update velocity alerts, you must have the firebasecrashlytics.config.update permission. The following roles include this required permission by default: Firebase Crashlytics Admin, Firebase Quality Admin, Firebase Admin, or project Owner or Editor.

Configure a velocity alert threshold for each of your registered apps. Each app can have a different alert threshold.

  1. In the Firebase console, go to your Crashlytics dashboard.
  2. At the top of the page, select an app from the app dropdown list.
  3. In the top bar of the Issues pane, open the overflow menu (), then select Velocity alert settings.
  4. Follow the on-screen instructions to configure the alert threshold for the app.

Receive alerts

Get default alerts

By default, Firebase can send Crashlytics alerts via email. For velocity alerts and regressions, Firebase can also show these alerts in the Firebase console.

To receive Crashlytics alerts using this default mechanism, you must have the firebase.projects.update permission. The following roles include this required permission by default: Firebase Admin or project Owner or Editor.

By default, every project member (who has the required permissions to receive alerts) will get an email when an alert from Crashlytics is triggered.

Turn on/off alerts for your own account

For your own account, you can turn on/off Crashlytics alerts without affecting other project members. Note that you still need the required permissions to receive alerts.

To turn Crashlytics alerts on or off, follow these steps:

  1. In the Firebase console, in the top right-corner, go to Firebase alerts.
  2. Then, go to Settings and set your account preference for Crashlytics alerts.

Set up basic alerting to third-party services

For Crashlytics alerts, Firebase offers a mechanism to send alerts to the following third-party services: Slack, Jira, or PagerDuty. Set up these basic alerting options using prompted workflows in the Integrations tab in your Project settings.

Note that if you want more control and customization for sending alerts to any third-party service (not limited to only Slack, Jira, or PagerDuty), check out the Set up advanced alerting to third-party services section that describes advanced alerting options.

Set up advanced alerting to third-party services

You can send Crashlytics alerts to your team's preferred notification channel, using Cloud Functions for Firebase. For example, you can write a function that captures an alert event for velocity alerts and posts the alert information to a third-party service, like Discord, Slack, or Jira. With this advanced alerting mechanism, you can fully customize the information sent to the third-party service; for example, you can include helpful deep-links into the Firebase console or add company-specific troubleshooting information.

To set up advanced alerting capabilities using Cloud Functions for Firebase, follow these steps:

  1. Set up Cloud Functions for Firebase, which includes the following tasks:

    1. Set up a development environment for Node.js or Python.
    2. Install and sign into the Firebase CLI.
    3. Initialize Cloud Functions for Firebase using the Firebase CLI.
  2. Write and deploy a function that captures an alert event from Crashlytics and handles the event payload (for example, posts the alert information in a message on Discord).

To learn about all the Crashlytics alert events that you can capture, go to the reference documentation for Crashlytics alerts.