Alerting
Alerts Tuned Per Monitor, Routed Per Team
A good alert is one your on-call is glad to get at 3am. A bad alert is the eleventh one they’ve ignored this week. StatusDrift lets you tune the signal service by service — per-monitor thresholds, per-monitor channels, and an on-call policy when you want a calendar-based escalation path instead of a static channel list.
Free forever tier includes Email, Slack, and webhook alerts. No credit card.
Per-Monitor Thresholds, Not One Global Knob
Critical services deserve to be paged instantly. Lower-tier services can wait out a blip. StatusDrift’s alert tuning lives on the monitor, not on the account — so the checkout API can page on the first failure while the marketing site waits three checks and five minutes before anyone hears about it.
- Notification delay — from “Immediate” up to 1 hour. Presets at 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 15, 20, and 30 minutes for common tuning points
- Consecutive Checks Down to Alert — require N consecutive failed checks before firing. At a 1-minute interval with 3 consecutive, a transient packet-loss blip doesn’t page anyone
- Locations Down to Alert — require failures from multiple regions before firing. A bad minute from one checking node doesn’t look like a full outage
- Response time thresholds — alert when the service is technically up but too slow to be usable
- Recovery notifications — know when the monitor goes green again, through the same channels that paged you in the first place
Two Routing Models — Pick Per Monitor
StatusDrift’s alerting is per-monitor, not severity-based. You attach channels directly to the monitor, or you hand it off to an on-call policy — both models work at the same time, monitor by monitor.
Direct channel list
Attach one or more channels to a monitor: Slack, Email, mobile push, webhook — any combination. Simple, fast, and right for most non-critical services. The monitor fires, the channels receive, the team sees it.
Good for: internal tools, non-customer-facing services, anything that doesn’t need a calendar-based on-call rotation.
On-call policy
Hand the alert off to a calendar-based schedule with multi-step escalation. The first step is usually a schedule, later steps hand off to another schedule or a named responder if the first doesn’t acknowledge within the configured delay.
Good for: production-critical services, anything you want paged 24/7 with a real rotation. See on-call scheduling →
No severity levels, no account-wide routing rules, no “alert-type” categorization. Each monitor carries its own routing — simple to reason about, easy to audit.
20 Notification Channels
Attach any combination to a monitor — chat, incident tooling, personal, automation, observability. Channel-type docs →
Slack
Microsoft Teams
PagerDuty
Opsgenie
Discord
Webhook
Mobile Push
Also supported: Google Chat, Mattermost, ServiceNow, Datadog, PagerTree, VictorOps, Zenduty, Telegram, Pushover, Pushbullet, Zapier, IFTTT, and n8n. Need SMS or voice calls? Route through PagerDuty, Opsgenie, or any incident-management integration that handles carrier paging as part of their paging stack.
Cut the Noise Without Missing the Signal
Multi-location confirmation
A single checking region having a bad minute doesn’t look like a global outage. Require confirmations from multiple regions before a monitor fires — fewer false pages, more trust in the ones that do. Multi-location docs →
Maintenance windows
Schedule a window before a deploy, migration, or recurring restart. Alerts stay silent for exactly that period — no 2am false pages for work you planned. Maintenance window docs →
Common workflows, preconfigured
“Notify only after 3 consecutive failures across 2 regions, wait 5 minutes, then page the on-call.” Patterns like this are documented and ready to apply — no hand-rolling a tuning strategy. Common workflow docs →
Questions Teams Usually Ask
Do you send SMS alerts?
Not directly. StatusDrift sends through chat tools (Slack, Teams, Discord, Google Chat, Mattermost), incident platforms (PagerDuty, Opsgenie, PagerTree, VictorOps, Zenduty), personal channels (Email, Telegram, Pushover, Pushbullet), mobile push, and generic webhooks. If you need SMS or voice, route through PagerDuty or Opsgenie and let their paging stack handle it — StatusDrift hands the incident off and they page.
Can I use different channels for different services?
Yes — channels are attached per monitor. Page PagerDuty for the checkout API, ping Slack for the marketing site, email the team for an SSL expiry. Or point a monitor at an on-call policy and let the calendar handle routing.
What about severity levels?
StatusDrift’s model is per-monitor, not severity-based. The monitor you attached the alert to determines the response — a “critical” monitor can page through Opsgenie, a lower-priority one can just post to Slack. You get the same outcome without a separate severity taxonomy to maintain.
What’s the minimum setup to stop false pages?
Three knobs, all per-monitor: set Consecutive Checks Down to 2 or 3 so a single bad check doesn’t fire; set Locations Down to 2 or more so a regional blip needs confirmation; set a Notification Delay of a minute or two to let transient issues self-correct. This alone filters out most noise from healthy services.
Do I get notified on recovery too?
Yes. Recovery notifications fire through the same channels that alerted on the failure, so the “all clear” gets to the same audience. No more wondering whether the incident is really over.
Can I define alerts in Terraform?
Yes — the StatusDrift Terraform provider covers alert contacts, monitors, and on-call policies. Review alert routing changes in pull requests and apply them alongside the service they protect.
Pairs Well With
On-Call Scheduling
For services that need a calendar-based rotation and multi-step escalation instead of a static channel list.
Incident Management
The alert opens an incident — and the incident becomes the system of record for the response, the status page update, and the postmortem.
Integrations
The full catalog of notification channels and observability integrations you can attach to monitors.
Alerts Your On-Call Will Actually Trust
Per-monitor tuning, 20 notification channels, calendar-based escalation. Free forever tier includes Email, Slack, and webhook.