How do UpCanary alerts work?
Get notified when your monitors detect issues - via email now, with Slack, Discord, and more coming soon.
UpCanary alerts you the moment your monitors detect a problem, so you can respond before users notice. Notifications are delivered through channels you configure and controlled by rules that specify when and where alerts go.
Notification Events
UpCanary sends notifications for three monitor state transitions:
| Event | When It Fires |
|---|---|
| Down | Monitor transitions from Up to Down (outage confirmed by multi-region consensus) |
| Degraded | Monitor is reachable but behaving unexpectedly - wrong status code, slow response, or assertion failure |
| Recovery | Monitor transitions back to Up after being Down or Degraded |
Down alerts are the most critical - they indicate your service is unreachable from multiple regions. Degraded alerts are early warning signals: the service is up but not healthy. Recovery alerts close the loop so you know when the incident has resolved without having to check manually.
Current Notification Channels
Email is the primary notification channel available today. When a monitor changes state, UpCanary sends an email to your configured addresses with:
- The monitor name and what changed (Down / Degraded / Recovered)
- The time the state change was detected
- Which regions reported the issue
- A direct link to the monitor detail page
Emails go to the addresses configured in your Notification Channels settings. You can create multiple email channels - for example, one for your personal address and one for a team alias.
Setting Up Notifications
Notifications in UpCanary are configured in two steps:
- Create a channel - define where notifications go (e.g., an email address)
- Create a rule - specify which monitors send to which channels and for which events
See Notification Channels and Notification Rules for step-by-step setup instructions.
Coming Soon
UpCanary is actively building out additional notification channels. The following integrations are on the roadmap:
| Channel | Status |
|---|---|
| Slack | Coming soon |
| Discord | Coming soon |
| PagerDuty | Coming soon |
| OpsGenie | Coming soon |
| Microsoft Teams | Coming soon |
| Webhooks | Coming soon |
| SMS | Coming soon |
| Phone calls | Coming soon |
When these channels become available, you’ll be able to add them from the Notifications > Channels section without changing your monitor configuration - your existing rules will route to them automatically.
Alert Fatigue and Consensus
UpCanary’s multi-region consensus is your first line of defense against alert fatigue. Alerts only fire when 2 or more regions confirm an outage, so transient network blips from a single location don’t generate noise.
For fine-grained control over when you get notified, notification rules let you:
- Restrict alerts to specific monitors or groups
- Choose which events (Down, Degraded, Recovery) trigger a notification
- Route different severity levels to different channels
See Notification Rules for the full configuration options.