Alerts & Notifications

Ionhour sends alerts when your checks change status — going down, running late, or recovering. You configure alert channels at the workspace level, and all checks in the workspace use those channels.

Alert Channels

An alert channel is a destination where Ionhour sends notifications. Each workspace can have multiple channels, and each channel can be independently enabled or disabled.

Supported Channel Types

Ionhour supports 14 notification channel types across five categories:

Chat

Email

Phone

Webhook

Incident Management & Issue Trackers

Email Alerts

Email is the simplest notification channel. You configure a list of recipient email addresses, and Ionhour sends an email whenever an alert is triggered.

Setting Up Email

Per-User Preferences

Individual users can opt out of email notifications in their profile settings. When a user disables email notifications:

• They are removed from the recipient list for email channels.
• Shared/external email addresses (not tied to a user account) are unaffected.

This lets teams use a shared inbox (e.g., [email protected]) that always receives alerts, while individual team members can control their own notification volume.

Slack Alerts

Slack alerts post messages directly to a Slack channel using an incoming webhook. The integration uses Slack's OAuth flow — no manual webhook URL configuration required.

Setting Up Slack

The Slack channel is now connected and will receive alerts immediately. You can verify the connection by clicking Test on the channel to send a test message.

Webhook Alerts

Webhook channels send a JSON payload to any URL you configure. This is useful for building custom integrations with internal tools, triggering automation workflows, or forwarding alerts to services that Ionhour doesn't have a native integration for.

Setting Up a Webhook

Incident Management Integrations

PagerDuty, OpsGenie, Jira, and YouTrack channels create incidents or issues directly in your existing incident management and issue tracking tools. Each integration has its own setup drawer — navigate to Settings > Alerts, click Add Channel, and select the service to see the required configuration fields.

What Triggers Alerts

Ionhour sends alerts for these events:

Check Status Changes

Dependency Impact

Outbound Check Alerts

Alert Content

Each alert includes contextual information to help you respond quickly:

Down alerts include:

• Time of the last successful signal
• When the next signal was expected
• 24-hour uptime percentage (when available)
• Link to the incidents page

Recovery alerts include:

• Total downtime duration (from incident start to resolution)
• Time of recovery
• Current uptime percentage

Latency alerts include:

• Measured latency vs. configured threshold
• How much the latency exceeds the limit

SSL alerts include:

• Days remaining until expiry
• Exact expiry date

Testing Channels

After setting up a channel, use the Test button to send a test notification. This verifies that the channel is correctly configured and can deliver alerts. We recommend testing after any configuration change.

Managing Channels

Enable / Disable

You can temporarily disable a channel without deleting it. Disabled channels don't receive any alerts. This is useful during maintenance windows or when you want to silence a specific channel without losing its configuration.

Muting Individual Checks

If a specific check is noisy, you can mute notifications on that check instead of disabling an entire channel. Muted checks won't trigger alerts regardless of their status, but incidents are still created and tracked.

Muting is configured per-check in the check settings, not at the channel level.

Best Practices

• Use multiple channel types. Email provides a reliable, searchable record. Chat (Slack, Teams, Discord) provides real-time team visibility. Incident management tools (PagerDuty, OpsGenie) provide structured on-call routing. They complement each other.
• Set up a shared inbox. Use a team email address (e.g., [email protected]) that always receives alerts, even if individual team members have notifications disabled.
• Test after setup. Always send a test notification after configuring a channel. A misconfigured channel that silently drops alerts is worse than no channel at all.
• Don't mute — fix. If you're muting a check because it's too noisy, the check's schedule or grace period probably needs tuning. Muting should be temporary, not a permanent workaround.
• Review alert fatigue. If your team is ignoring alerts, you have too many. Tighten your thresholds, increase grace periods, or raise the consecutive failure count on outbound checks.
• Use webhooks for custom workflows. If you need to trigger automation (restart a service, page a custom system), use a webhook channel to forward alerts to your own endpoint.