DPE Alerting Processes

Overview

This document details some initial fact finding on how DPE handles alerting for processes that they own. This is a high-level overview as of Feb 2026 and may not be comprehensively correct.

DPE Team’s approach to alerting

DPE's alerting solution is primarily composed of connecting Databricks to Microsoft Teams. On a workspace level, Databricks can configure notification destinations which supports Teams. This can be used to specify a particular channel that an alert gets sent to. Jobs can then have webhook notifications configured on certain run events like a failure. This workflow for Databricks extends to other notification sources like SQL alerts, so that potentially increases the scope of useful alerting.

Importantly, this approach to alerting requires no custom code or additional infrastructure, although it does limit how granular you can make the logic. There are simple extensions to this by pointing the Databricks alerts to a custom middleware service, which would allow for greater control.

DPE is exploring some alternatives to Teams, such as email for more personal alerts (it sounds like right now all alerts are getting dumped to the same channel, so it isn’t always obvious who is responsible for responding). It didn’t seem like they were pushing too strongly for that as there were concerns email alerts would get lost in inboxes whereas Teams alerts are easy to see/respond to. The team did say that Teams was unlikely to be the sole alerting process in the long term.

Beyond Databricks right now, it seems DPE’s alerting is limited. They said that it was not until recently that they even had permissions to do much in Azure, so their footprint there is limited. Most of DPE’s core work is ingesting data into Databricks anyways, so it’s expected that the center of gravity for them will be within Databricks.

On the more proactive side, they said they haven’t done much for passive monitoring or more general observability. Based on the conversation, it seems any alerts in that vein would follow the similar flow as their job alerting.