How notifications work
When alerts fire, what they contain, and how PageWarden avoids waking you for nothing.
Alerts are the whole point of monitoring: PageWarden watches quietly and only reaches out when it matters. This page explains when an alert fires and what to expect.
When you get alerted
PageWarden sends you two kinds of alert:
- Incident started when a monitor goes down and the failure has been confirmed.
- Incident resolved when the monitor recovers, along with how long it was down.
You are not alerted for every single failed check. PageWarden first confirms the failure across regions so a brief network blip does not become a 2 a.m. false alarm. When you get an alert, something is genuinely wrong.
What an alert contains
An alert tells you which monitor is affected, what failed, and when. On Starter and Pro, incidents also include a plain-English diagnosis of the likely cause.
Where alerts go
Every plan includes email. Paid plans add Slack, Discord, Telegram, and webhooks. You decide which monitors send to which channels. See:
Alert channels
The full list and what each is for.
Routing alerts
Send different monitors to different places.
See and acknowledge incidents
Every incident across your monitors is listed on the Incidents page in the sidebar, newest first, with how long each lasted. Open one to see the detail, and on Starter and Pro the plain-English diagnosis of the likely cause. You can Acknowledge an incident to note that someone is on it, separately from whether it has recovered yet.
Test before you rely on it
Each channel has a Send test action in its ⋮ menu on the Alerts page. Use it whenever you add a channel so you know the alert will actually reach you before a real incident happens.