Alerts & Notifications Overview
Understand how PulsAPI detects incidents and delivers notifications to you and your team.
Alerts & Notifications Overview
PulsAPI continuously monitors the status of every service you subscribe to. When something changes — a degradation, a partial outage, or a full outage — the alerting system evaluates your alert rules and delivers notifications through the channels you have configured.
How it works
The alerting pipeline has three stages:
| Stage | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1. Detection | PulsAPI's crawler detects a status change on a monitored service (e.g., Operational to Degraded). |
| 2. Rule evaluation | Your alert rules are checked. Each rule defines a condition (which statuses trigger it), a severity level, and one or more actions. |
| 3. Delivery | Notifications are sent through your configured channels — email, Slack, Discord, custom webhooks, and the in-app notification bell. |
Key concepts
- Alert rules — Configurable conditions that determine when you get notified. You can create multiple rules with different severity and scope. See Alert Rules.
- Notification channels — Where notifications are delivered. PulsAPI supports email (via Mailgun), Slack webhooks, Discord webhooks, and custom HTTP webhooks. See Notification Channels.
- Notification preferences — Per-service settings that control the volume of notifications you receive. Choose from levels like ALL, MAJOR_ONLY, or NONE. See Notification Preferences.
- In-app notifications — The bell icon in the top navigation bar shows a popover with recent alerts, unread counts, and quick-acknowledge actions.
- Notification history — A log of every notification sent, including its delivery state (sent, pending, or failed) and whether it was acknowledged.
Where to configure alerts
| Setting | Location |
|---|---|
| Alert rules | Dashboard → Alerts → Rules |
| Notification channels | Dashboard → Settings → Notification Channels |
| Per-service preferences | Service detail page → Notifications tab or Dashboard → Settings → Notification Preferences |
| Notification history | Dashboard → Alerts → History |
Start by setting up at least one notification channel (email is enabled by default), then create an alert rule. You can fine-tune per-service preferences later.