Alerting overview

Monitoring is only useful if someone hears about it. In Aloft, alerting is the bridge between a monitor changing state and a human (or another system) finding out. This page explains how that works and how to wire a monitor up to the right channels.

How alerting works

1. A monitor runs checks on its own schedule.
2. When enough consecutive checks fail, Aloft opens an incident and the monitor flips to Down.
3. The moment that incident opens, Aloft sends a down alert to every channel attached to that monitor.
4. When checks start passing again, Aloft resolves the incident, the monitor returns to Up, and Aloft sends an up (recovery) alert to the same channels.

In other words, you get notified on both edges of an outage — when it starts and when it ends. The recovery alert includes the total downtime so you can see at a glance how long the outage lasted.

Note

A monitor only opens an incident after a configurable number of consecutive failures, so a single blip won’t page you. See Scheduling and confirmations.

One monitor, many channels

A monitor can be attached to zero or more channels, and a single channel can be reused across as many monitors as you like. Channels are shared, org-wide building blocks — you set up an email address, a Slack webhook, or a PagerDuty key once, then attach it wherever it’s useful.

When an incident opens or resolves, Aloft fans the alert out to every enabled channel attached to the monitor, in parallel. A channel that’s been disabled is skipped (see Channels for how to disable one).

Attaching channels to a monitor

You attach channels when you create or edit a monitor:

1. First, make sure the channels you want exist. Go to Alerts in the top navigation and add them on the Channels tab. See Channels.
2. Open the monitor you want to alert on (or start a new one) and go to its edit form.
3. Scroll to the Alert via section. It lists every channel in your organization with a checkbox.
4. Tick each channel that should be notified for this monitor.
5. Save the monitor.

That’s it — the next time the monitor goes down (or recovers), the channels you ticked will receive the alert.

Tip

If the Alert via section doesn’t appear on the monitor form, it means your organization has no channels yet. Add one first on the Channels tab.

Maintenance windows suppress alerts

Planned work shouldn’t page anyone. When a monitor is covered by an active maintenance window, Aloft suppresses incident-opening and alerts for that monitor for the duration of the window — so a deploy or scheduled reboot won’t trigger a false alarm. Set these up ahead of time and suppression happens automatically. See Maintenance windows.

Where to go next

• Channels — set up email, Slack, Discord, Teams, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, SMS, and generic webhooks.
• Webhooks and signing — the JSON payload Aloft posts and how to verify its signature.
• Delivery log and replay — see every notification Aloft has sent and re-send one after a fix.