Is it possible to make the ‘name’ that incidents provide for an alert more useful than:
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Hey @tim.davis - The text following triggered is the condition name. Is it the SystemSample query that you are interested in changing?
If so - I don’t believe that this will be possible.
Otherwise, you can absolutely add context to your condition name, such that WarnLoadAvgTestFiveMinute has more actionable detail.
If it is that you want to change the SystemSample query section of that, let me know and I’ll get a feature request filed for you 
Would prefer it to be warningwhatever trigger on facet details
Understood! I’ll get that added in as a feature request for you. 
This is something that is definitely in need of improving. We have recently done a few things to improve the immediate usefulness of alert notifications and violations.
For Infrastructure and APM Violations, we are adding all Entity Tags to the violation and including them with the subsequent notification. We are working on adding Entity identification and tag integration to NRQL conditions as well. We do not send tags to Slack because of the number of tags that may be present, but see the “description” bullet below.
For NRQL Conditions, you can add multiple attributes to the FACET clause in NRQL to specify which Attribute key:value pairs from your time series query result (aka ‘the signal’) are passed through to Alerts, and therefore included with your violations and notifications. I think of these as “signal tags”, as they are embedded within the signal that you send us.
We have added templated descriptions to conditions. This description field supports variable substitution, allowing you to include values from Tags (entity and signal tags) in the description text that is attached to violation and sent with notifications. see more info in the docs : https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/alerts/new-relic-alerts/defining-conditions/alert-condition-descriptions
We have plans to allow the “title” of a violation to be user definable using the same template model that we introduced with Templated Descriptions. I am hoping to get this feature later in the year, but we do not have it scheduled yet.
This may be a stupid question, but, is there video showing these newer features yet? I am more of a visual vs RTFM type of learner.
How do I get hostname as a parameter in the description in Infra?
Hey @tim.davis,
First of all, there’s no stupid questions 
!
Second of all, there isn’t a video showing the new feature on Templated Descriptions in Alerts but let me see if i can offer some help.
Just below the Name field for your alert condition, theres a space for the description. The description will show up when you get a notificaiton on the notification channel you’ve configured for the policy.
Here I have used the example from the docs page Brian Goleno linked above to show how it looks in the New Relic Infrastructure Alerts interface. I have {{ tag.fullHostname }} attribute in my description text. This will be converted to the actual hostname when I get an alert meeting this condition.
Here’s an example of an email alert notification. You will see that the {{tag.fullHostname}} and {{conditionName}} attributes have been parsed into their corresponding values.
You can find what all attributes are supported for Alert Descriptions at this link:
https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/alerts/new-relic-alerts/defining-conditions/violation-event-attributes
Let me know if there’s anything else you needed clarification on, I hope that these visual aides helped you understand how to use the Templated Descriptions feature a bit better.
I will have to try again. tag.fullHostname didn’t work on my initial infrastructure alert tests.
My other question is if there is a way to see the available metatags available to a specific alert. For a file system alert, I would want the file system that is at risk also, but that may be different than the options for other things being monitored.
Hi @tim.davis
you can view all available attributes (which includes all metatags) of any event type by querying the event type being used.
If the alert condition is a NRQL condition,
SELECT keyset() FROM EventType
If the alert condition is an Infrastructure condition, you can make the same query, but you’ll need to translate the condition type to determine which event type to focus on:
SystemSample
NetworkSample
ProcessSample
StorageSample
I hope this helps!
This helps a ton. Thank you.
Great! Let us know if there’s anything else we can help with!
Is there a way where we can implement similar functionality (customizing the Alert description) for NRQL based alerts?
Basically, I need to send the data of events to briefly describe the alert condition.
This recent update from our Alerting product manager notes that coming soon is the ability to customise notification messaging:
This should allow you to send notifications that describe the conditions. Watch out for that feature release soon 
This may not be the complete solution but I am able to fulfill most of my requirement with the approach Customize webhook payload.
We can use the variables that are mentioned here in our custom payload to design our notification message.
In case if we need to extract the data from events to display in the notification message, then you need to mention the field names in the FACET in NRQL, so that they will be available under $TARGETS variable.
For eg:
select count(*) from myevent where status='active' facet name, details
From here, we can see the information of name & details under $TARGETS variable in the custom payload & can be sent to the notification channel.