What a message says
The first line is the alert in bold, then the facts in a line or two, what to do, the monitor's address and a link to its page. These are the messages for an outage and its end:
Uptime alerts App 10:32
Website is down
Frankfurt and Virginia get 502 Bad Gateway.
Down since 10:32 UTC.
We'll post here again when it's back.
https://example.com/ · Open the monitor
Uptime alerts App 10:32
Website is back up
Back up at 10:41 UTC, after 9 minutes down (since 10:32 UTC).
https://example.com/ · Open the monitor
Slow answers, instability, a fast-burning error budget and certificates close to expiry are posted the same way; How it works lists every alert.
Set it up
- In Slack, add the Incoming Webhooks app to the channel and copy the URL it gives you. It starts with
https://hooks.slack.com/. - In BBoxProbe, open Alert channels and, under Add an alert channel, pick Slack as the kind.
- Give it a Name, such as "On-call", and paste the URL into Slack incoming webhook URL (starts with https://hooks.slack.com/).
- Press Add channel, then Send a test on its card. The test arrives as "Test from BBoxProbe: your Slack channel 'On-call' works".
- Alerts now go there from every monitor that hasn't picked its own channels. To send only some monitors' alerts there, tick it under Alert channels in those monitors' settings.
The webhook URL works like a password for the channel, so the app shows only its host and last characters once it is saved, and keeps it encrypted.
When Slack can't take it
Each alert is posted as it happens, and its closing notice when it ends. When Slack doesn't answer within 10 seconds or answers with an error, the alert is tried again 1, 5 and 15 minutes later. After the last try it goes to your account email instead, saying which channel couldn't take it and why. The channels page lists the last 50 alerts and tests sent, with each channel's result.
The number of alert channels depends on the plan: 1 on Free, 3 on Pro, and 10 on Max. Every kind of channel is on every plan.