# Change Alerts

## Overview

Change alerts allow you to stay informed about important changes to your PostgreSQL databases, like addition or deletion of users, tables, indexes, or abrupt increases or decreases in table size, and more. While regular alerts are based on thresholds (like table size exceeding a certain limit), change alerts are based on the difference between two consecutive reports. When change alert rules are set, pgDash will check every incoming report against the previous one.

Change alerts are designed to keep you informed of any major change happening to your fleet of databases. They can catch unplanned upgrades, restores, schema modifications and rogue scripts inserting or deleting data. They can also be used to detect security concerns like creation of new users or modification of users (change of privileges, group membership).

Change alerts can be set from the pgDash UI. Notifications can be sent to email addresses, Slack channels and PagerDuty.

The Change Alerts feature is available in the Pro and Enterprise versions of pgDash SaaS and self-hosted / on-premise.

## Setting Change Alerts

Select the changes you would like to be alerted about from the pgDash UI. 

![The UI in pgDash for setting change alerts](/files/-LM5puYdl5myT-OsMHod)

Send notifications via email, Slack channels and PagerDuty. Use the panel at the bottom of the same Change Alerts page to set the destinations:

![Setting notification destinations for change alerts](/files/-LM5puYfic_pvsLuJJ58)

## Notifications

When an alert has been triggered, you will get notifications that look something like this: 

![A change alert email notification](/files/-LM5puYgSv5Q_NxcokoT)

![A change alert Slack notification](/files/-LM5puYigoYfWN4Z02yM)


---

# Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation

If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question.

Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter:

```
GET https://docs.pgdash.io/change-alerts.md?ask=<question>
```

The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language.
The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation.

Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.