Notifications
Drumbeats notifications deliver incident and recovery alerts. Channels are delivery endpoints, groups bundle channels, alert logic decides when to fire.
Drumbeats notifications page your team when an incident opens and again when the monitor recovers. The system has three concepts you wire together once per project: channels (the delivery endpoints — Slack, email, webhook, push), groups (named bundles of channels that monitors route to), and alert logic (the per-monitor tolerances and surge protection that decide when a paging round actually fires).
The three concepts
| Concept | What it is | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| Notification channel | One delivery endpoint — one Slack channel, one email address, one webhook URL. Connected once per project. | Channels |
| Notification group | Named collection of channels. Every channel in the group receives the alert when the group is paged. | Groups |
| Alert logic | Per-monitor settings (failure_tolerance, schedule_tolerance, alert_surge_threshold) that decide when an incident actually pages the group. | Alert logic |
A monitor references one or more notification groups by ID. When the monitor flips DOWN, every channel in every assigned group fires in parallel. The OPEN | ACKNOWLEDGED | RESOLVED incident state machine drives whether a second alert (re-page) is sent — see Alert logic for the cooldown rules.
The 30-second setup
1. Channels → Create one Slack channel + one email channel
2. Group → "Backend on-call" = Slack #backend-alerts + email backend@company.com
3. Monitor → Assign "Backend on-call" group to each backend monitor
4. Test → Send a manual failure ping, verify both channels received it1. Channels → Create one Slack channel + one email channel
2. Group → "Backend on-call" = Slack #backend-alerts + email backend@company.com
3. Monitor → Assign "Backend on-call" group to each backend monitor
4. Test → Send a manual failure ping, verify both channels received it[SCREENSHOT: notifications/overview — channels list, group list, and a monitor's group selector side by side]
Channel types
Drumbeats currently supports six channel types — all available on every plan.
| Type | Use it for | Setup |
|---|---|---|
| Browser push | Personal real-time alerts on desktop or mobile (Safari iOS 16.4+ needs Home Screen). | One click in the dashboard. |
| Team-wide visibility, low-friction fallback, external recipients. | Add address; external addresses get a confirmation email. | |
| Slack | Channel-based team alerting. | OAuth into your workspace. |
| Telegram | Personal or group chats, channels, forum topics. | Bot connect flow with /start. |
| Discord | Community / dev-server alerting. | OAuth into your server. |
| Webhook | Custom HTTP request — bridge into PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Datadog, your own system. | Simple (fixed payload) or Advanced (custom URL + headers + templated body). |
See Channels for per-type setup and the full webhook payload reference.
What an alert looks like
Every alert message includes the monitor name, the incident type (MISSED, FAILED, DURATION_HIGH, DURATION_LOW, hung-run), the timestamp, and a deep link into the dashboard. Recovery messages include outage duration.
Where to go next
- Channels — per-type setup, payload reference for Webhook channels, test-before-rely workflow.
- Groups — how to organize routing by team or severity, sample setups.
- Alert logic — tolerances, surge protection, recovery notifications, cooldown rules.
- Push troubleshooting — every reason a push alert might not arrive and how to fix it.
- Incidents — the state machine that drives when notifications fire.
- REST API — Notification Channels and Groups — programmatic read access.