Alerting
Alert escalation and on-call hours
Who is told first, who is told if it is still broken later, and the hours in which each step may wake somebody.
Destinations
Six ways to be told
Email and SMS reach a person who is not at a screen. Slack, Discord and Microsoft Teams reach the room where the work is already happening. A webhook reaches whatever you have built yourself: a pager, a ticket queue, a script that restarts the thing.
A destination is verified once, then any monitor or group can use it. An address that has not confirmed receives nothing, which is what keeps this from being a way to send mail to strangers.
- Email, verified by a code, with a monthly quota per plan
- SMS through GatewayAPI, to any country
- Slack, Discord and Microsoft Teams, by incoming webhook
- Your own webhook, with the check result as JSON
Escalation steps
An alert group is a sequence. Email after three consecutive failures. If it is still down ten minutes later, a text message to somebody else. A monitor points at one group instead of carrying its own list of addresses.
Changing who is on call is one edit rather than forty.
- Any mix of destinations per step
- Hours belong to the step: email at any hour, SMS only during the day
- Times follow the timezone on your account, across daylight-saving changes
A step outside its window waits
It is not skipped. An outage that starts at midnight still escalates in the morning; skipping would mean an overnight failure never escalates at all.
Recoveries are sent too
Every incident that opens also closes, on the same channels.
A new account starts with its own email address already verified and attached, so the first monitor somebody creates cannot silently be one that records an outage and tells nobody.
Questions
- Which channels can PingFleet alert on?
- Email, SMS, Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, and your own webhook. A monitor can use any mix of them, at any step of an escalation.
- Will it wake me for a one-second blip?
- Only if you ask it to. A step fires after a number of consecutive failures, and the default is three, so a single failed check is recorded and nothing is sent.
- Can I stop SMS at night?
- Yes. Hours belong to the step, not to the account: email at any hour, SMS only between the hours you name, on the days you name, in your timezone.
- What happens to a step whose hours have passed?
- It waits rather than being skipped. An outage that starts at midnight escalates in the morning, because skipping would mean an overnight failure never escalates at all.
- How many SMS do I get?
- SMS is sent through GatewayAPI and is charged to us, so it is limited per plan. Email quotas are per plan too, and both are listed on the pricing page.
- Can I acknowledge an alert so it stops escalating?
- Yes. Acknowledging an incident stops the remaining steps without resolving it, which is the difference between "somebody is on it" and "it is fixed".