Documentation · Use
Alerts and notifications
Alerts are set up once for the organisation, under Alerts in the dashboard, and apply to every site unless a rule says otherwise. Only owners and admins can change recipients and rules.
Recipients
A recipient is one destination: an email address, a Slack channel, a phone number for SMS, or a phone number for WhatsApp. Every destination confirms by double opt-in before it receives anything, so a mistyped address or number gets nothing.
| Destination | How it is added | Carries |
|---|---|---|
| An address, confirmed from the first message it receives. | Everything, down to the minimum severity you set. | |
| Slack | Add to Slack and choose a channel, or paste an incoming webhook URL. | Everything, down to the minimum severity you set. |
| SMS | A phone number, confirmed from the first message it receives. | Critical alerts only, because each message is paid for. |
| A phone number, confirmed the same way. | Critical alerts only. |
The free Watch plan sends email only. The paid plans add Slack, SMS and WhatsApp, with a daily allowance of text messages per organisation and a limit on phone numbers; both are on the pricing page.
Each recipient has its own minimum severity: everything, warnings and critical, critical only, or the same as the rule. "Everything by email, critical by SMS" is therefore two recipients and no extra rule. A recipient's own setting overrides the rule it is attached to.
Rules
A rule is the organisation's policy on who hears about what:
- Which recipients. All confirmed recipients, now and in future, or a chosen few.
- Which sites. All sites, including ones added later, or a chosen few.
- Which detectors. Every detector is on unless you untick it. A rule hears a subject only when both its detector and what it is about are ticked.
- Quiet hours. In each site's own time zone. Critical alerts still go out during quiet hours; warnings and information wait.
Most organisations need one rule. A second one is for an agency that routes each client's sites to that client's channel.
Summaries
Instead of one message per event, a rule can send:
- information alerts as one hourly summary;
- a daily summary at 08:00 site time of anything unusual but not urgent;
- a weekly report every Monday;
- reminders about decisions waiting for you, such as a proposed monitor that nobody has confirmed.
What an alert contains
An alert says what was seen, which normal it was compared against, and the revenue affected when the metric carries revenue, or the amount at risk when it does not. When a figure needed for the estimate is missing, it says which one rather than guessing.
On Insight, a critical incident starts an AI review. The first email is held briefly so the diagnosis arrives in the message that reports the incident. If the review has not finished within 15 minutes the alert goes out without it, and the review appears on the incident page when it completes.
Deliveries
The Deliveries tab lists every message sent, to whom, and whether the destination accepted it, so a missing alert can be traced to the step where it stopped.