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How do UpCanary notifications work?

Configure how and when you get notified about monitor status changes and service incidents.

UpCanary’s notification system is split into two parts: Channels define where alerts go, and Rules define when they fire. You configure them independently, then connect them.

Channels: Where Notifications Go

A channel is a destination for alerts - an email address, a Slack workspace, a webhook endpoint. You can have multiple channels of the same type (for example, two different email addresses) and use them selectively across different rules.

Currently available:

  • Email - send alerts to one or more email addresses

Coming soon:

  • Slack
  • Discord
  • Webhooks
  • PagerDuty
  • OpsGenie
  • Microsoft Teams
  • SMS
  • Phone calls

See Notification Channels for setup instructions.

Rules: When Notifications Fire

A rule defines which events trigger an alert and which channels receive it. Rules can be scoped globally (apply to all monitors) or targeted to a specific monitor or service.

Trigger events you can configure:

  • When a monitor goes down
  • When a monitor becomes degraded
  • When a monitor recovers to up

See Notification Rules for full configuration details.

How They Work Together

The typical setup looks like this:

  1. Create a channel - add your email address as an email channel.
  2. Create a rule - set a global rule that fires on “down” and “recovery” events, and assign your email channel to it.
  3. From that point on, any monitor that goes down triggers an alert to your email, and another alert fires when it recovers.

For more targeted alerting, you can create rules specific to individual monitors. A rule on a specific monitor takes precedence over global rules for that monitor.

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