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How do I set up my team in UpCanary?

Set up your team workspace, invite members, and configure notification rules for everyone.

Getting your team set up in UpCanary means your whole team shares monitors, gets alerted together, and can respond to incidents without everyone needing separate accounts. This guide walks through the initial setup.

Step 1: Name Your Team

When you first sign up, UpCanary creates a team workspace for you. To set your team name:

  1. Go to Settings > Team.
  2. Enter your team or company name in the Team Name field.
  3. Click Save.

Your team name appears in invitation emails and the workspace header, so use something recognizable to your colleagues.

Step 2: Invite Team Members

Invite your colleagues from Settings > Team > Members:

  1. Click Invite Member.
  2. Enter their email address.
  3. Assign a role:
    • Admin - for engineers and on-call staff who need to create and modify monitors
    • Member - for developers who should be able to create monitors but not manage team membership
    • Viewer - for managers, stakeholders, or clients who need read-only visibility
  4. Click Send Invite.

Repeat for each person. Invites expire after 7 days - you can resend from the Pending Invites section if someone misses the email.

Role guidance:

  • Give Admin to people who will configure the monitoring setup day-to-day
  • Give Member to developers who need to add monitors for their own services
  • Give Viewer sparingly - it is ideal for stakeholders who ask “is everything okay?” but should not be making changes

Step 3: Set Up a Shared Notification Channel

Create a shared email notification channel that the whole team receives alerts on. This ensures that when something goes down, it is not silently waiting in one person’s inbox.

  1. Go to Notifications (or find notification settings in the monitor configuration).
  2. Create an Email channel using a shared address - for example:
  3. Name the channel clearly, e.g., “Engineering On-Call” or “Ops Team”.

Using a shared address means new team members are automatically in the loop when they are added to the distribution list, without needing to reconfigure monitors.

Step 4: Configure Global Notification Rules

For each monitor (or when creating new ones), configure notifications to fire on the events your team cares about:

  • Down - always notify. This is the primary alert.
  • Recovery - always notify. Knowing when a service comes back up is just as important as knowing when it went down.
  • Degraded - optional. Enable this for critical services where partial failure matters.

Apply the shared notification channel from Step 3 to all production monitors.

Best Practices

Match roles to actual responsibilities. Avoid giving everyone Admin access by default. Use Member for people who create monitors but should not be adding or removing team members.

Use a distribution list, not individual emails, for on-call alerts. Individual email channels break when team members change - a shared alias keeps routing separate from monitor configuration.

Create one notification channel per audience. For example: one channel for the engineering team, one for management (with a higher threshold - only critical failures), and one routed to your incident management tool.

Document your monitoring setup. Add a brief note in your team’s runbook or wiki describing which monitors exist, what they cover, and who owns them. This helps new team members understand the setup without needing to dig through UpCanary.