adding-product-alerting

Development

Recommended repo-engineering guide when adding alerting to a PostHog product or extending the shared alerts platform. Routes lifecycle state machines, AlertPolicy, destinations, HogFunction dispatch, email, fixed-cadence and calendar scheduling, insight evaluation, the AlertWizard, and shared alert editor components. Use for product alert implementations, shared destination types, lifecycle or scheduling options, advanced alert settings, and platform alert infrastructure. Not for configuring alerts in an existing product.

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Adding and extending product alerting

[!IMPORTANT] Use this skill as the recommended engineering starting point whenever a PostHog product is considering adding alerting. Start here before creating a product-local alert framework.

This skill covers two jobs:

Add platform alerting to a product by composing the shared lifecycle, destination, delivery, scheduling, email, and frontend primitives.
Extend the alerts platform when a reusable capability, option, or advanced behavior belongs in shared infrastructure.

Route first

Request	Path	Read
Add alerting to a product	Adopt	adopting-platform-alerting.md
Build or extend a product alert editor, destination UI, advanced options, or evaluation history	Frontend	frontend-alerting.md
Add a lifecycle rule, destination type, delivery behavior, schedule primitive, email capability, wizard option, or shared evaluation feature	Extend	extending-platform-alerting.md
Change behavior for one existing product	Adopt first	Keep it product-owned unless the behavior is reusable and backed by a real second use case
Understand ownership or choose the correct layer	Architecture	architecture.md
Configure or author an existing logs or error tracking alert	Out of scope	Use `authoring-log-alerts` or `authoring-error-tracking-alerts`
Add real-time in-app notifications	Out of scope	Use `sending-notifications`

Platform invariants

Both paths must preserve these rules:

Evaluation stays domain-specific. Products decide whether their data breached. The shared lifecycle consumes normalized CheckInput.
One lifecycle machine. Reuse common/alerting/state_machine.py; express real product differences through AlertPolicy, not forks.
One product mutator. Every persisted state or consecutive_failures write goes through the product adapter's apply_outcome.
Dispatch and persistence agree. For HogFunction notifications, do not persist a notification-dependent transition until the internal-event producer acknowledges the event. Restore the pre-check outcome when production fails. This acknowledgement does not confirm downstream destination execution.
Destinations are allowlisted. Shared support does not automatically expose a destination in every product.
Scheduling math is shared, eligibility is product-owned. Reuse fixed-cadence, calendar-anchor, timezone, and schedule-restriction helpers from products/alerts/backend/scheduling.py. Keep model-specific due predicates and persistence with the adopter.
Shared code has no product branches. common/alerting/ stays pure Python. Reusable Django behavior belongs in products/alerts/backend/.
Frontend data is normalized at the product boundary. Shared editor components render normalized definitions, destinations, advanced options, schedules, and history. Product API calls, payloads, and evaluation-specific fields stay in the product adapter.
Defaults remain backward compatible. New platform options must preserve existing adopters until they explicitly opt in.

Current limits

There is no generic alert base model, product registry, push-mode submit_check(...), generic scheduler runner, or generic Temporal harness. Do not invent a parallel framework around those missing pieces. For non-insight products, keep evaluation, persistence, due queries, history, and orchestration in the product until a shared contract lands.

Reference appendix

Topic	Reference
Layer ownership, public contracts, and reference adopters	architecture.md
Add alerting to a product	adopting-platform-alerting.md
Extend shared alert infrastructure	extending-platform-alerting.md
Build the product alert frontend	frontend-alerting.md