Alert Channels

Pingara delivers notifications through multiple channels so your team gets alerts wherever they work, whether that's email, chat, or on-call systems. All six channels are available on every plan, including Free. None of them is plan-gated.

Available Channels

Email

Email is the default notification channel included with every Pingara account.

Setup

1. Go to Settings → Alert Policies → [Your Policy]
2. Click Add Channel
3. Select Email
4. Enter the recipient email address
5. Save

Configuration Options

• Recipient: Any valid email address
• Multiple recipients: Add separate email channels for each address

What You Receive

Down alert email:

Subject: 🔴 [Pingara] Monitor Down: api.example.com

Your monitor "api.example.com" is DOWN.

Status: Investigating
Error: HTTP 503 Service Unavailable
Region: US East (N. Virginia)
Started: 2024-01-15 14:32 UTC

View incident: https://www.pingara.io/incidents/abc123

Recovery email:

Subject: 🟢 [Pingara] Monitor Recovered: api.example.com

Your monitor "api.example.com" has RECOVERED.

Duration: 12 minutes
Resolved: 2024-01-15 14:44 UTC

Tip: Use a shared team inbox or mailing list (e.g., alerts@yourcompany.com) so the whole team has visibility.

Slack

Real-time alerts delivered directly to your Slack channels.

Setup

1. Create an Incoming Webhook in your Slack workspace:
   • Go to Slack App Directory
   • Create a new app → Incoming Webhooks → Enable
   • Click Add New Webhook to Workspace
   • Select the target channel (e.g., #monitoring-alerts)
   • Copy the webhook URL
2. In Pingara, go to Settings → Alert Policies → [Your Policy]
3. Click Add Channel → Slack
4. Paste the webhook URL
5. Save

Rich Message Format

Pingara sends formatted Slack messages with:

• Color-coded sidebar (red for down, green for recovery)
• Monitor name and URL
• Error details and affected region
• Direct link to the incident in Pingara
• Timestamp

Best Practices

• Create a dedicated #monitoring-alerts channel
• Set up Slack notification preferences so you don't miss critical alerts
• Use separate channels for production vs staging alerts

For detailed setup instructions, see Slack Integration.

Microsoft Teams

Setup

1. In your Teams channel, click ⋯ → Connectors → Incoming Webhook
2. Name the connector "Pingara Alerts"
3. Copy the webhook URL
4. In Pingara, add a Teams channel with the webhook URL
5. Save

Message Format

Teams notifications include:

• Adaptive card with monitor status
• Color-coded status indicator
• Direct link to incident details
• Region and error information

Discord

Setup

1. In your Discord server, go to Channel Settings → Integrations → Webhooks
2. Click New Webhook
3. Name it "Pingara" and select the target channel
4. Copy the webhook URL
5. In Pingara, add a Discord channel with the webhook URL
6. Save

Message Format

Discord messages use embeds with:

• Color-coded sidebar
• Monitor name and status
• Error details in structured fields
• Timestamp footer

Webhooks

Custom webhooks let you integrate Pingara with any system that accepts HTTP requests.

Setup

1. In Pingara, add a Webhook channel
2. Enter your endpoint URL
3. Save

There is no step in between: a webhook channel is a URL and nothing else. Pingara does not sign, authenticate or add custom headers to an outgoing delivery. See Webhook Integration for what that means for your endpoint and the one mitigation available today.

Payload Format

Pingara sends a POST request with a JSON body:

{
  "event": "incident.created",
  "timestamp": "2024-01-15T14:32:05.000Z",
  "monitor": {
    "id": "m1aa2b3c4d5e6f",
    "name": "api.example.com",
    "url": "https://api.example.com/health"
  },
  "incident": {
    "id": "i9zz8y7x6w5v4u",
    "errorType": "timeout",
    "errorMessage": "Connection timeout after 30000ms",
    "affectedRegions": ["us-east-1"]
  }
}

monitor never carries more than id, name and url. On incident.created and incident.degraded, incident carries only the fields above; incident.resolved adds duration (a formatted string like "12 mins, 4 secs", not a number of seconds) and incident.escalated adds duration and escalationCount. There is no status, startedAt or resolvedAt on any of them, and no top-level organization block.

Event Types

There is no monitor.degraded, monitor.recovered or incident.updated event. A manual status change does not dispatch a webhook through this alert channel. A separate feature, webhook subscriptions, does send an event for a manual incident resolve or reopen, a general monitor.status_changed event independent of the incident stream, and ssl.expiring/domain.expiring events with a numbers-only payload shape different from this channel's ssl/domain blocks (see Webhook Integration). If you're looking for any of these, see the webhook subscriptions section of the Developer API article.

For detailed payload documentation, see Webhook Integration.

PagerDuty

Setup

1. In PagerDuty, create a new Service or use an existing one
2. Add a Pingara integration (or use the Events API v2)
3. Copy the Integration Key (routing key)
4. In Pingara, add a PagerDuty channel with the integration key
5. Save

How It Works

• Incident created → PagerDuty alert triggered (follows your escalation policy)
• Incident resolved → PagerDuty alert auto-resolved
• Deduplication - Pingara uses the incident ID as the dedup key to prevent duplicate pages

Best Practices

• Pingara sets a PagerDuty severity automatically based on the event type (for example, a new incident triggers critical, a degraded monitor or SSL warning triggers warning). Use PagerDuty's urgency and escalation rules to route from there
• Use PagerDuty's on-call schedules for after-hours rotation
• Configure PagerDuty escalation rules as a secondary layer to Pingara's own escalation

Managing Channels

Enable / Disable

Toggle a channel on or off without deleting it. Useful for temporary silencing during maintenance.

Testing

After adding a channel, send a test notification to verify delivery:

1. Go to the channel settings
2. Click Send Test
3. Verify the message arrives

Multiple Channels

You can add multiple channels to a single alert policy. All enabled channels receive notifications simultaneously.

Example setup:

Production Alert Policy:
  ├── Email → ops-team@company.com
  ├── Slack → #prod-alerts
  └── PagerDuty → Production Service

Staging Alert Policy:
  └── Slack → #staging-alerts

Troubleshooting

Notifications Not Arriving

1. Check channel is enabled - Disabled channels are silently skipped
2. Verify webhook URL - Ensure it's correct and the destination service is running
3. Check alert policy - Is the trigger enabled? (Down, Recovery, etc.)
4. Check monitor linkage - Is the alert policy linked to the monitor?
5. Check spam folder - Email notifications may be caught by spam filters

Duplicate Notifications

• Ensure you don't have the same channel added to multiple overlapping policies
• Check that repeat notification settings aren't too aggressive

Next Steps

• Setting Up Alerts - Create and configure alert policies
• Slack Integration - Detailed Slack setup guide
• Webhook Integration - Custom webhook payloads