Notification Groups

A Drumbeats notification group is a named bundle of notification channels. Monitors are wired to groups (not directly to individual channels), so the same routing can be reused across many monitors and updated in one place. When the group is paged, every channel in the group fires in parallel.

Why groups exist

• Separation of concerns — your nightly-backup monitor pages the DBA team; your API worker pages the backend team. Two groups, distinct destinations.
• Severity routing — critical monitors page a high-noise group (Slack + email + push); low-priority monitors page Slack-only.
• Reuse — fifty monitors all wired to one "Backend on-call" group means changing the on-call rotation is a one-place edit instead of fifty.

Creating a group

1. Open Settings → Notification Groups → New Group.
2. Give it a name that describes the audience or severity (Backend on-call, Critical infra, Low priority).
3. Tick one or more channels.
4. Save.

[SCREENSHOT: notifications/group-create — the group creation form with channel checkboxes ticked for Slack, Email, and a Webhook]

Assigning a group to a monitor

Open any monitor → Edit → Notification Group → pick the group → Save. A monitor can have multiple groups; every channel in every assigned group fires when an incident opens. A monitor with no group assigned will not page anyone.

[SCREENSHOT: notifications/monitor-group-picker — the monitor edit panel showing the Notification Group dropdown with three groups attached]

Example setup

A realistic four-group layout for a small team:

Tips

Related guides

• Notifications hub — channels, groups, and alert logic side-by-side.
• Channels — set up the channels groups bundle together.
• Alert logic — what triggers a group to fire and how cooldown / surge protection work.
• REST API — Notification Groups — programmatic read access.