What's Throttling
You have received a Canary throttling notification and wonder why this has happened.
Canary throttling is our way of stopping the Canary console from spamming you with alert notifications (over email, sms and the various webhooks).
IP Throttling
If a threshold of incidents on a Canary have been triggered in a time period by a single source IP, we will stop email, sms and webhook alert notifications of these incidents. (We will then send a final set of notifications to let you know that we have throttled the alerts for this source).
This throttling will continue to occur if the same Canary continues to receive incidents triggered by the same source IP. The throttling will be turned off automatically if the Canary does not receive more incidents from the source IP after a "cool down" period.
Please note that this information isn't lost! (The incidents are still visible on your Canary console). Please contact support if you would like to discuss changing the default values for these thresholds.
Per Channel Throttling
If your Canary hits a threshold of notifications in a period of time, that notification channel (sms, email or webhooks) will be throttled. This means that you will no longer receive incident alert notifications via the offending notifications channel (sms, webhook or email).
Email, SMS and webhooks all have different notification thresholds to ensure we do not spam you. The incidents are still recorded in your Canary Console for you to go see once you get a moment.
We have added this notification throttling because we do not want to bug you with hundreds of alerts if one of your Canaries is left to fend for itself against the open internet or a scanner. We understand that you have probably seen the notifications and will take action as soon as you can.
Please contact support if you would like to discuss changing the default values for these thresholds.
Tiered Throttling
We have introduced tiered throttling. This works the following way:
- Once you are being throttled because of too many incidents from a particular IP against a particular Canary; we silence notifications if that combination continues.
- If that same Canary keeps getting throttled, from numerous IPs, we move the Canary into the next tier which means it will be silenced from all notifications for a day.
- If this continues to the point that you have been notified up to 35 times about throttling in a single week (thats a whole lot of emails), we permanently silence the bird from email and sms notifications.
Why?
We hate the idea of spamming you. We promised that any time we bug you (with an email, sms or webhook), it would be for something important/urgent.
The throttling is aimed at controlling the amount of noise you hear from us. If you would like throttling disabled, please contact support and we will make it happen.