Send uptime alerts to a Discord channel

Your team already watches a Discord channel, so that's where your team will see a down alert. This guide connects a site to a channel with a Discord webhook. No bot and no app install is involved.

What you need

• A Discord server where you have the Manage Webhooks permission on the channel you want to use.
• A monitored site in OctoPing, and a role of Member, Admin or Owner to add a notification to it.

Connect the channel

1. 1. Create a webhook in Discord

   In Discord, open the channel's settings, choose Integrations, then Webhooks, and create a webhook. Give it a name, such as OctoPing, and copy its URL. It starts with https://discord.com/ and ends with a number and a long token, like this one.

   https://discord.com/.../123456789012345678/YOUR_TOKEN

2. 2. Add a Discord notification

   In OctoPing, open the site and go to its Notifications page. Choose Add Notification, enter a Notification Name such as Discord #alerts and set Notification Type to Discord. Paste the URL into Discord Webhook URL.

3. 3. Choose which alerts to send

   Under Alert on, switch on the events you want in this channel. Site goes down and Site recovers are the usual pair. Content changes and Hosting changes are there too if the channel is for that. Open Delivery settings to change the Retry Threshold, which is how many failed checks in a row it takes before the first alert, and the Notification Interval, which is how long OctoPing waits between repeat alerts. New notifications start at 3 failures and 10 minutes.

4. 4. Send a test

   Choose Send Test. A message titled Test Notification, with the site's address, is sent to the channel, and OctoPing shows the result on the page. If it doesn't arrive, the notification's log records the reason.

What the channel receives

OctoPing posts one embed for each alert. The title is the alert's subject line, the description is the alert text cut at 2048 characters, and the footer reads OctoPing. For a website the title links to the site in OctoPing. The color of the embed shows the kind of alert, so a glance tells the channel what happened. A down alert is red, a recovery is green, and the test message is blue-violet. This is the body OctoPing sent for a down alert in our test, shortened.

{
  "embeds": [
    {
      "title": "\ud83d\udd34 Alert: https://example.com/ is down",
      "description": "Site Down Alert\n===============\n\nWebsite: https://example.com/\nConsecutive failures: 3\n...",
      "color": 15548997,
      "footer": { "text": "OctoPing" },
      "timestamp": "2026-11-07T04:55:47.228530+00:00",
      "url": "https://octoping.com/w/.../websites/..."
    }
  ]
}

Discord doesn't have a layout of its own for each alert type. The description holds the same text an email carries, so the channel and the inbox say the same thing. The Discord reference lists the color of every alert.

Verify it works

• The test message arrives in the channel you picked.
• The notification's log on the Notifications page shows the test as Sent. A failure shows the status Discord returned. A 404 means the webhook was deleted, and a 429 means Discord is slowing the sender down.
• A real down alert arrives after the Retry Threshold is met. With the default of 3, that's 3 failed checks in a row. When the site comes back, a green recovery message follows.

Use Discord for a heartbeat too

A heartbeat has the same Discord option on its own Notifications page. Add the webhook URL there, and a late cron job posts to the channel the same way a site does. The cron job guide shows how to set one up. A signed webhook is the better fit when you want to run your own code on an alert.