Contacts
Add your clients to a status page so they get every alert for its sites and a monthly summary: consent, what is sent, when and how a contact leaves.
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On this page
Contacts are the clients you add to a status page so they hear about everything that happens to the sites and heartbeats on it. A contact gets an email for each alert and a monthly summary, and is never a user or a seat. This page covers who can add one, what a contact receives, when mail is sent and how a contact leaves.
Contacts and subscribers
A status page has two kinds of recipient, and they're kept separate on purpose.
| Contact | Subscriber | |
|---|---|---|
| Added by | A Member or above, in the page's settings | The visitor, from the public page |
| Opt-in | You confirm the person agreed. They get a welcome email. | The visitor confirms by email. |
| Receives | Every alert for the page's sites and heartbeats, plus a monthly summary | Only the incident updates you choose to send |
| Mail identity | The page title as sender name, with one line naming your workspace | The page title as sender name, with no mention of OctoPing |
An alert meant for a contact, such as an expiring certificate or a changed DNS record, never goes to a public subscriber. Subscribers are covered on Subscribers and feeds.
Add a contact
Open the status page, find the Contacts section and choose Add contact. A Member, Admin or Owner can add, edit and remove contacts, and a Viewer can read the list. Contacts are available on the free trial too.
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Name | Shown in your list and used in the emails. |
| One address. The same address on two pages is two contacts, one per page. | |
| This person agreed to receive these emails | Required. You're confirming the client agreed, and OctoPing refuses the contact without it. |
After you add a contact, OctoPing sends a welcome email. It says who added them, what they'll receive, links to the page and holds the unsubscribe links. If the page is a draft or the workspace is paused when you add the contact, the welcome waits and goes out once mail can be sent.
What a contact receives
Alerts
A contact is emailed about every visible site and heartbeat on the page. A hidden item sends nothing. The alerts follow the decisions your own notifications already make, so they use the same retry threshold, the same region confirmation and the same maintenance rules as yours. An alert that a maintenance window holds back, or that the probe regions contradicted, doesn't reach contacts either. Read Alert rules for those rules.
| Alert | Notes |
|---|---|
| Site down | One email per outage. There are no reminders while it lasts. |
| Recovered | Sent only to contacts who received the down alert. |
| Heartbeat missed | One email per outage, with a recovered email after it. |
| Slow response | Sent when a slow spell starts, not for each repeat. |
| Checker blocked notice | Sent when OctoPing's own checker is refused and the other regions still reach the site. |
| SSL certificate expiring | At most once every 3 days. |
| Domain expiring | At most once every 3 days. |
| Content, HTTP status, DNS, robots.txt, WHOIS and hosting changes | Follow the change toggles on your own notifications. |
A monitor you disable during an outage closes it without any email, so a contact isn't told something recovered when it didn't.
The monthly summary
At the start of each month a contact receives a summary of the previous month for the sites on the page. It is normally sent on the 1st, and OctoPing retries on the 2nd and 3rd for any contact whose email failed. A summary that is more than a few days late is dropped. It uses the same calculation as your workspace's own monthly summary, limited to the page's visible sites, so the numbers agree. For each site it covers uptime, downtime and outages, average response time, certificate and domain expiry dates and change counts, and it mentions planned maintenance for those sites.
- A page with no visible site sends no summary.
- Heartbeats aren't in the summary, the same as in your own.
What the email looks like
- The sender name is the page's title and Reply-To is the page's Reply-To address when you've set one.
- The email carries the same facts as your own alert and one line that names your workspace as the one monitoring the client's sites with OctoPing.
- Links go to the status page, using its custom domain when one is live. No link points into your OctoPing account, and there's no tracking pixel.
- Each email has an unsubscribe link and the one-click header mail apps use. An alert email has links to stop alerts or stop everything, and the monthly summary has links to stop the summary or stop everything.
When mail is sent
OctoPing sends contact mail only while the page is published and the workspace isn't paused for billing. A draft page and a paused workspace send nothing, and mail starts again when the page is published or the plan is active. The Contacts section reminds you of this with a note.
Switches, states and opt-outs
Each contact has an Alerts switch and a Summary switch in your list, so you can send one kind and not the other. A contact can also opt out on their own, and you can't turn a kind back on after that. The list shows Opted out in place of the switch.
| State | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Active | Receives the kinds that are switched on. |
| Unsubscribed | Left the mail through an unsubscribe link. |
| Suppressed | OctoPing stopped mailing the address after a hard bounce or a spam complaint. It applies to the address on every page, and subscribers share it. |
Unsubscribing never reveals whether an address is a contact, and a contact who leaves alerts still receives the summary unless they leave that too. If you remove a contact who had opted out or been suppressed and add the address again, the earlier choice comes back with it.
Allowance
Contacts and subscribers share the workspace's subscriber allowance, which is set by the plan and listed on Pricing. When the allowance is full, adding a new contact is refused with a message that says so, and mail to the contacts you already have continues. A contact who is suppressed or has left all mail doesn't count.
What contacts don't include yet
- Choosing which sites a contact hears about. A contact hears about every visible item on the page, so create a separate page for a client who should see only some.
- Importing contacts in bulk or exporting them as a file.
- Heartbeats in the monthly summary.
Related pages
- Status pages covers the page the contacts belong to.
- Alert rules explains how an alert is decided.
Related
- DocsStatus pagesCreate, brand and publish a status page, choose what it shows and run an incident from first update to resolution.
- DocsSubscribers and feedsHow visitors subscribe by email, what an incident email contains, the settings and limits, suppression and the Atom and RSS feeds.
- DocsAlert rulesHow a failed check becomes an alert: the retry threshold, the repeat interval, the four triggers, recovery, the default notification, the log and what a maintenance window holds back.
- ForWebsite monitoring for agencies: all client sitesMonitor client websites with every check on each site, a white-label status page per client, and client contacts who get alerts and a monthly summary without a seat.
- GuideAdd a client as a status page contactSend a client every alert for their sites and a monthly summary by email, without giving them a login or using a seat.