You decide who hears about a problem, through which channel, after how many failed checks and how often the reminders repeat, so the alert that wakes someone up is one worth waking them for.
Alert rules
Each site and each heartbeat has its own alert rules. A rule is one channel with its own recipients and its own settings, and a site can have as many rules as you need, for example an email to the account manager and a Slack message to the on-call channel. When you add a site, OctoPing creates a default email rule addressed to everyone in the workspace at that moment, with a retry threshold of 3 and a repeat interval of 10 minutes.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Retry threshold | How many failed checks in a row it takes before the first down alert. Default 3, from 1 to 10. |
| Repeat interval | Minutes between reminders while the site stays down. Default 10, from 1 to 1440 (one day). |
| Site goes down | Down alerts and reminders, slow-response alerts, certificate and domain expiry warnings, and the notice that our checker is blocked. |
| Site recovers | The recovery message, with the downtime and the cause. |
| Content changes | Changes to a page's text, DNS records, robots.txt and the domain registration, plus changes in the HTTP status a site returns. |
| Hosting changes | A move to a different hosting provider or network. |
Recovery messages aren't held back by the repeat interval, and one is sent only when a down alert went out for that outage. Heartbeat rules have the same retry threshold and repeat interval, with switches for missed and recovered only.
Channels
| Channel | How it works |
|---|---|
| Branded HTML with a plain-text fallback, to as many recipients as you like. | |
| Slack | Installed as a real Slack app, posting rich Block Kit messages to a channel you pick. Connect Slack once for the workspace, then pick a channel for each rule. |
| Discord | Colour-coded embeds through a webhook URL. |
| Webhook | A JSON POST to your URL. Add a signing secret and each request carries an X-OctoPing-Signature header with an HMAC-SHA256 of the raw body, plus any custom headers you set. Site alert webhooks are retried with growing delays when your endpoint fails. |
| Browser push | Native notifications on the devices of the teammates you list, once they've allowed notifications in their browser. |
The webhook body has an event name, a subject, a message, a timestamp, the site's id and URL (or the heartbeat's id and name) and, on site alerts, a details object with the facts behind the alert.
What an alert says
A down alert gives the cause (Timeout, DNS resolution failed, TLS/SSL error or the HTTP status), the response time, the error detail and the result from each location it was checked from. The recovery alert gives the downtime and the cause. Every channel carries the same facts.
Website: https://example.com
Problem: Service Unavailable (HTTP 503)
The server is unavailable, overloaded, or in maintenance.
HTTP status: 503 Service Unavailable
Consecutive failures: 3
Checked from
------------
Primary: Down (HTTP 503)
US: Down (HTTP 503)
Europe: Down (HTTP 503)
Asia: Down (HTTP 503)
View details in OctoPing: <link to the site>What a maintenance window silences
While a maintenance window covers a site, the down alert and its reminders, slow-response alerts, status-change alerts and the blocked-checker notice are held back, and a heartbeat sends no missed alert. Certificate and domain expiry warnings and change alerts for content, DNS, robots.txt and hosting still go out. If the site was already down when the window began, its recovery alert is sent as soon as it recovers.
A record of every attempt
Each attempt is logged as sent, failed or skipped, and a skipped alert records why, such as maintenance. Send a test from any rule to check the recipients and the channel before something breaks. Clients added as contacts on a status page hear about the page's sites and heartbeats without a rule of their own: one email when an outage starts and one when it ends, with expiry warnings at most once every three days.
How it fits the price
Email, Slack, Discord, webhook and browser alerts are on every plan, with signed webhooks and as many alert rules per site as you need. Plans start at $19 a month for 20 sites. See pricing for the full list.
Every account starts with a 14-day free trial. No card required. Start your 14-day trial and add a client's site to see it working.
Last reviewed
Related
- FeatureWebsite uptime monitoring with the cause in every alertCheck client sites as often as every 30 seconds, see why a check failed, and flag slow responses as degraded. Planned work stays out of your uptime numbers.
- FeatureWhite-label status pages with custom domains and subscribersPublish a status page in your client's branding, with incidents, scheduled maintenance, email subscribers, feeds and client contacts. Custom domains on paid plans.
- 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.
- DocsWebhooksThe JSON payload for every website and heartbeat event, the request headers, how to verify the HMAC signature in Python, Node.js, PHP and Go, and how retries work.
- DocsEmail alertsWho receives an email alert, what the message contains and how to read the notification log when one doesn't arrive.
- GuideSend uptime alerts to a Discord channelGet down and recovery alerts for your sites in a Discord channel your team already watches.
- GuideReceive signed webhooks from OctoPingSend OctoPing alerts to your own server and check each request's signature before you act on it.