### Alert Action Properties

In a message flow, use the alert action to generate alerts based on message context in a pipeline, to send to an alert destination. Unlike SLA alerts, notifications generated by the alert action are primarily intended for business purposes, or to report errors, and not for monitoring system health. Alert destinations should be configured and chosen with this in mind. To learn more about alert destinations, see Alert Destination editor.

If pipeline alerting is not enabled for the service or at the domain level, the configured alert action is bypassed during message processing.

In the Message Flow Editor, click an alert action to display its properties in the Properties view. Use these properties pages to configure the selected alert action. The pages are:

- Alert
- Comment
- Namespaces
- Variables

The Alert page has the following options:

Option | Description
--- | ---
Expression | An XQuery expression that specifies the message context to be added to the alert message. To create or edit an expression, click <Expression> (or the expression_fragment, if one is already defined) to display the XQuery/XSLT Expression Editor.
Summary | A short description of the alert. This will be the subject line in the case of an e-mail notification and can contain no more than 80 characters. If no description is provided, a predefined subject line that reads, "ALSB Alert," will be used instead.
Severity | The severity level for this alert. Select a level from the list.
Destination | The destination for the alert. To specify a destination, click Browse to select an appropriate resource.

Tip: | To prevent exceptions from aborting the message being processed when generating a pipeline alert, it is recommended that an error handler for the alert action be defined to handle and contain such exceptions locally, rather than having them bubble up to a global error handler.

Use the Comment page to add a comment, if desired:

Use the Namespaces page to see a list of defined namespaces or to create a new one.

Use the Variables page to see a list of defined context variables or to create a new one. For more information about context variables, see Message Context in the AquaLogic Service Bus User Guide.