Creating an alert with a watch

Prior to version 7.12, Watcher was used as the mechanism to alert on anomalies found by Elastic ML. Watcher is a very flexible native plugin for Elasticsearch that can handle a number of automation tasks and alerting is certainly one of them. In versions 7.11 and earlier, users could either create their own watch (an instance of an automation task in Watcher) from scratch to alert on anomaly detection job results or opt to use a default watch template that was created for them by the Elastic ML UI. We will first look at the default watch that was provided and then will discuss some ideas around custom watches.

Understanding the anatomy of the legacy default ML watch

Now that alerting on anomaly detection jobs is handled by the new Kibana alerting framework, the legacy watch default template (plus a few other examples) are memorialized in a GitHub repository here: https://github.com/elastic/examples/tree/master/Alerting/Sample%20Watches/ml_examples...