Create and manage silence policies - Application Real-Time Monitoring Service

During maintenance windows, incident response, or periods of known issues, alert notifications can overwhelm on-call teams without adding value. Silence policies in Application Real-Time Monitoring Service (ARMS) filter and converge alerts that match specific rules, reducing the possibility of alert storms.

When matching rules are triggered, the alert events are silenced and are not matched by notification policies.

Common use cases:

Planned maintenance -- Silence expected alerts during infrastructure upgrades.
Incident response -- Reduce notification noise during active investigation.
Known-issue suppression -- Mute alerts for issues with a fix already in progress.

Important

Silence policies take precedence over notification policies. Any alert event that matches a silence policy is silenced and cannot be matched by a notification policy. For more information, see Create and manage a notification policy.

Create a silence policy

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure that you have:

An Alibaba Cloud account with access to the ARMS console

Define the policy

Log on to the ARMS console. In the left-side navigation pane, choose Alert Management > Silence Policies.
On the Silence Policies page, click Create Silence Policy.
Set Silence Policy Name. Choose a descriptive name, such as k8s-cluster-maintenance or staging-env-mute.

Configure matching rules

In the Silent Event Matching Rule section, define which alert events to silence.

Select a data source.
- To silence alerts from a specific integration, select that data source.
- To silence alerts from all sources, leave the data source unspecified.

Specify one or more expressions by selecting existing tags or adding custom tags. Conditions within the same rule use AND logic -- all conditions must match for the rule to apply. Separate rules use OR logic -- if any rule matches, the alert is silenced.

To add an AND condition within the same rule, click + Add Condition.
To add a separate OR rule, click + Add Rule.

Example matching patterns:

Goal	Configuration
Silence alerts from a specific cluster	Add a condition: `clustername` equals your cluster name
Silence P3 and P4 alerts only	Add a condition: `severity` equals `P3`, then click + Add Rule and add `severity` equals `P4`
Silence alerts from a service in a specific namespace	Add two AND conditions in the same rule: `namespace` equals your namespace, and `alertname` equals the alert name

Available tags

Tags come from two sources: fields defined in your alert rule expressions, and default tags provided by ARMS.

For information about creating tags in alert rule expressions, see Create an alert rule for a Prometheus instance.

Common fields

Tag	Description
`alertname`	Name of the alert
`clustername`	Name of the Kubernetes cluster
`severity`	Severity level. Valid values: P1, P2, P3, P4, Default
`namespace`	Kubernetes namespace
`pod_name`	Kubernetes Pod name

Preset system fields

Tag	Description
`_aliyun_arms_integration_name`	Name of the integration specified as the data source. Default: `ARMS-DEFAULT`
`_aliyun_arms_involvedObject_id`	ID of the object that triggers the alert
`_aliyun_arms_involvedObject_name`	Name of the object that triggers the alert
`_aliyun_arms_region_id`	ARMS region ID
`_aliyun_arms_alert_rule_id`	ID of the alert rule
`_aliyun_arms_alert_type`	Type of alert rule. Valid values: `101` (Prometheus alert), `5` (Application Monitoring alert), `4` (Browser Monitoring alert)

Set the effective period

Set Effective Period to control when the silence policy is active:

Option	Behavior	When to use
Persistent	Always active.	Long-term suppression of known issues.
Recurring	Active on a repeating schedule. Select Every Day or Weekly, then click Create.	Regular maintenance windows or off-hours muting.
Custom Time Period	Active during a specific time window. Click Create to define the start and end time.	One-time maintenance or scheduled deployments.

Save the policy

Click Save.

To verify, return to the Silence Policies page and confirm that the new policy appears with the expected status.

Manage silence policies

The Silence Policies page supports the following operations:

Operation	Steps
Edit	Click Edit in the Actions column. Update the settings and click Save.
Enable or disable	Toggle the switch in the Status column.
Delete	Click Delete in the Actions column, then click OK to confirm.
Copy	Click Copy in the Actions column to duplicate the policy.