Guide
Where alerts go
The server decides something is wrong. A policy decides who hears about it, through what, and how often.
Step by step
- Alerting → Channels → + New channel. Four kinds today, all webhooks: Slack-compatible, Microsoft Teams, Discord and plain JSON. The URL is stored once and never handed back, not even to you.
- The reply carries a signing secret, shown once. Every delivery is signed with it, in the X-HopMango-Signature header: verify it before you trust the payload. Lost it, or think it leaked? Press Rotate secret on the channel; the old one stops verifying at that instant.
- Press Send test before you rely on it. Every attempt, test or real, is recorded with its result.
- Alerting → Policies → + New policy. Choose what it matches on — severity, group, check type — and the channel it delivers to.
- Group window folds everything that happens inside it into one notification: forty checks failing from one cause is one story. Repeat after says when to say it again if nobody picks it up. Blank means once.
- Position decides the order, lower first, and the first policy that matches wins. Leave every criterion blank to make a catch-all, and put that one at the bottom.
- Press Try it, pick a host or a monitor and a severity, and the screen says who would be notified and why every other policy would not have run. Nothing is sent.
A phone call is not a channel
A webhook is where a notification is posted. A phone call is what happens when a critical incident needs a person, and that lives under On-call: the policy points at an escalation ladder, the ladder pages whoever is on the rotation, and it keeps going until somebody takes it. The number itself is set on On-call → Me.
What can actually reach you depends on the plan: the free one alerts by webhook, and a phone call comes with the paid ones. Push notifications arrive with the iPhone app, which is on its way to the App Store — and nothing you set up now has to change when it lands. What each plan includes.
The one thing people get wrong
A catch-all at the top. A policy with no criteria matches everything, so every policy below it never runs. The portal marks them NEVER REACHED and warns you above the list, and it is still the commonest reason a carefully written policy delivers nothing. Number the specific ones first and leave the catch-all last.
Where to go next
Then how to keep planned work quiet, and how a page finds a person.