Get historical values for alerting

they do not let you define in absolute terms how far from normal triggers an alert

We’ve done this in other cases. You can actually set a static threshold and a dynamic threshold. And the dynamic threshold has options to require the value be beyond a certain point before it triggers. Honestly, there should be a good explanation on setting thresholds and how they work. The UI does a poor job of explaining what all the options are. We had to figure it out with trial and error.