Every alert needs an owner
An alert that goes to "everyone" goes to no one. Add a notification channel per team or rotation, and disable channels rather than deleting them when people are away.
Make alerts actionable
A good alert says what is broken, since when, and what was observed. Upmonora's down alerts include the URL, the error, the HTTP status and when the outage started; recovery alerts include the total downtime.
Automate with webhooks
Webhooks carry events such as monitor.down, monitor.up, incident.created, incident.resolved and ssl.expiring. Each delivery is signed with HMAC-SHA256 so your receiver can verify it came from Upmonora - see the signature tutorial.
Fight alert fatigue
- Use failure thresholds of 2 or more.
- Schedule maintenance windows for deploys.
- Send performance alerts at most once every few hours.
- Fix or remove monitors that flap - they train people to ignore alerts.