How notifications work
When something happens to a Monitor, we tell people about it. Three things decide who hears what: your Channels, your Notification rules, and which rules each Monitor carries.
Channels
Section titled “Channels”A Channel is one place an alert can arrive, such as a list of email addresses, a Slack channel, a phone, or the Inbox in the dashboard. Channels belong to a Project. Find them in Project settings, on the Channels tab, and add one with Add a Channel.
Each type has a page on setting it up:
A Channel only says where a message goes. It never says which events, or which Monitors: a rule does that. So one Slack channel can hear everything about one Monitor and only outages about another.
A Webhook is not a Channel. It belongs to one Monitor and sends its events to your own endpoint: see Webhooks.
Notification rules
Section titled “Notification rules”A Notification rule chooses which events reach which Channels, and how often an outage is said again while nobody acknowledges it. Rules belong to a Project too. Find them in Project settings, on the Rules tab, and write one with Add a rule.
Notification rules goes through every part of a rule.
Adding a rule to a Monitor
Section titled “Adding a rule to a Monitor”A rule reaches only the Monitors it is added to. Nothing is inherited from the Project.
- Open the Monitor, then its Messages tab.
- The Rules card lists the rules this Monitor carries.
- Press Add rule and choose one of the Project’s rules.
To take a rule off this Monitor, press Remove beside it. The rule itself stays in Project settings, and still reaches its other Monitors.
A Monitor can carry several rules, or none. One that carries none, or whose rules reach no Channel that works, says Nobody will hear about an outage.
The Default rule
Section titled “The Default rule”Every Project starts with one rule, the Default rule. It sends every event to the Inbox and to the Owner Email Channel, the email address of the person who created the Project. It reminds every 1 hour while an outage is not acknowledged, and its warnings wait while the Monitor is down.
Every new Monitor starts with the Default rule. You can remove it from a Monitor, or edit it, but you cannot delete it. The Rules tab marks it Default.
The events a rule can send
Section titled “The events a rule can send”Each event belongs to one of a Monitor’s Checks. These are the events, in the words the rule editor uses:
| Check | Events |
|---|---|
| Uptime | Down, Back up, Regional outage, Not answering over IPv6 or IPv4 |
| Certificate | Invalid, Valid again, Expiring |
| Domain | Expired, Renewed, Expiring, Registration unreadable |
| Performance | Slow |
A new rule sends every event. While every event stays ticked, it also sends the events we add later.
Some of these events are warnings: news worth your attention while the target still works, such as a certificate that expires soon or an answer that got slow. A warning is never sent the moment it happens: see When warnings arrive.
Read on
Section titled “Read on”- The links in an alert: acknowledging an outage from the alert itself, and stopping alert emails.
- When a Channel is turned off: what happens when a Channel keeps refusing our messages.
- Inbox: the Project’s own Channel in the dashboard.