Setting up alert channels

Alert channels are configured once in your workspace settings, then attached to alert rules per site. Every plan includes all 10 channel types — nothing is gated behind a higher tier.

Available channels

Setup guides

Email

1. Enter the email address that should receive alerts.
2. Save the channel.

Webhook

1. Create an HTTPS endpoint that accepts POST requests.
2. Make sure it can receive JSON payloads from downctl.
3. Paste the endpoint URL into downctl.

Slack

1. Create a Slack app in your workspace.
2. Enable incoming webhooks for that app.
3. Add a webhook to the channel you want to notify and copy the URL.

See Slack's incoming webhooks guide for details.

Microsoft Teams

1. Open the Teams channel that should receive alerts.
2. Create an incoming webhook or connector for that channel.
3. Copy the generated webhook URL into downctl.

See Microsoft's incoming webhook guide for details.

PagerDuty

1. Open the PagerDuty service that should receive the alerts.
2. Add or open an Events API v2 integration.
3. Copy the routing key from the integration settings.

See PagerDuty's developer docs for details.

Discord

1. Open the Discord channel settings.
2. Create a webhook for that channel.
3. Copy the webhook URL into downctl.

See Discord's webhook resource docs for details.

Opsgenie

1. Open the alert integration you want to use in Opsgenie.
2. Create or open the integration for your team.
3. Copy the integration key into downctl.

See Opsgenie's Alert API docs for details.

Telegram

1. Create a bot with BotFather.
2. Copy the bot token and get the chat ID you want to notify.
3. Build the sendMessage URL (https://api.telegram.org/bot<TOKEN>/sendMessage?chat_id=<CHAT_ID>) and paste it into downctl.

Pushover

1. Create an application in Pushover.
2. Copy your application token and user key.
3. Paste the Pushover Messages API URL into downctl.

ntfy

1. Choose or create an ntfy topic that should receive alerts.
2. Copy the topic URL.
3. Paste the topic URL into downctl.

Routing alert rules to channels

Once a channel is saved, attach it to one or more alert rules per site — downtime, slow response, SSL expiry, DNS, domain expiry, server metrics (CPU/memory/disk), error rate, and cron monitor rules can each target a different set of channels. A single rule can notify multiple channels at once (for example, Slack plus PagerDuty for an on-call escalation). See alert rules for the full list of rule types and how to configure thresholds.