# Configure alerts
Netdata's health watchdog is highly configurable, with support for dynamic thresholds, hysteresis, alarm templates, and
more. You can tweak any of the existing alarms based on your infrastructure's topology or specific monitoring needs, or
create new entities.
You can use health alarms in conjunction with any of Netdata's [collectors](https://github.com/netdata/netdata/blob/master/collectors/README.md) (see
the [supported collector list](https://github.com/netdata/netdata/blob/master/collectors/COLLECTORS.md)) to monitor the health of your systems, containers, and
applications in real time.
While you can see active alarms both on the local dashboard and Netdata Cloud, all health alarms are configured _per
node_ via individual Netdata Agents. If you want to deploy a new alarm across your
[infrastructure](https://github.com/netdata/netdata/blob/master/docs/quickstart/infrastructure.md), you must configure each node with the same health configuration
files.
## Edit health configuration files
You can configure the Agent's health watchdog service by editing files in two locations:
- The `[health]` section in `netdata.conf`. By editing the daemon's behavior, you can disable health monitoring
altogether, run health checks more or less often, and more. See
[daemon configuration](https://github.com/netdata/netdata/blob/master/daemon/config/README.md#health-section-options) for a table of
all the available settings, their default values, and what they control.
- The individual `.conf` files in `health.d/`. These health entity files are organized by the type of metric they are
performing calculations on or their associated collector. You should edit these files using the `edit-config`
script. For example: `sudo ./edit-config health.d/cpu.conf`.
Navigate to your [Netdata config directory](https://github.com/netdata/netdata/blob/master/docs/configure/nodes.md) and
use `edit-config` to make changes to any of these files.
### Edit individual alerts
For example, to edit the `cpu.conf` health configuration file, run:
```bash
sudo ./edit-config health.d/cpu.conf
```
Each health configuration file contains one or more health _entities_, which always begin with `alarm:` or `template:`.
For example, here is the first health entity in `health.d/cpu.conf`:
```yaml
template: 10min_cpu_usage
on: system.cpu
os: linux
hosts: *
lookup: average -10m unaligned of user,system,softirq,irq,guest
units: %
every: 1m
warn: $this > (($status >= $WARNING) ? (75) : (85))
crit: $this > (($status == $CRITICAL) ? (85) : (95))
delay: down 15m multiplier 1.5 max 1h
info: average cpu utilization for the last 10 minutes (excluding iowait, nice and steal)
to: sysadmin
```
To tune this alarm to trigger warning and critical alarms at a lower CPU utilization, change the `warn` and `crit` lines
to the values of your choosing. For example:
```yaml
warn: $this >