Alerts Overview

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Overview

Watchman Tower alerts you when an incident opens on a monitor and again when it resolves. Alerts are configured per monitor and per person: everyone with access to a monitor has their own notification settings.

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Per-Monitor Notification Settings

Every monitor can have unique notification preferences: Configure for each monitor:

• Alert types - Turn each alert type (such as Availability or WordPress) on or off
• Channel selection - Choose which channels each alert type uses
• Slack channel - Pick the Slack channel for each alert type

Opening and recovery notifications belong together: an alert type that is on sends both.

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Managing Notifications

Besides each monitor’s Notifications tab, the Notification Settings page lists the settings of all your monitors, with filters and bulk on/off controls: Use it to:

• Check notification settings for every monitor at a glance
• Filter by monitor or alert type
• Turn alert types and channels on or off in bulk

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Available Notification Channels

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Alert Types

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Incident Alerts

An incident opens when checks confirm that a site is failing. Every site is checked from three regions (Frankfurt, New York, and Singapore). What opens an incident:

• Connection failures and timeouts
• HTTP error responses (500, 502, 503, etc.)
• DNS resolution failures
• SSL/TLS errors

When you are notified:

• An outage seen from all regions notifies immediately
• A failure seen from one region, or a partial one, must repeat across consecutive checks before an incident opens
• Lower-severity incidents wait 5 to 15 minutes before notifying; if the problem clears in that time, nothing is sent

What you’ll receive:

• Severity and a plain-language summary of what is failing
• The primary cause
• A link to the monitoring page

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Recovery Alerts

Sent when the incident resolves, on the same channels as the opening alert. Email, push, and Slack include how long the incident was open. A recovery alert is sent only if the opening alert was sent. If the site fails again within minutes of recovering, the same incident reopens and you receive one “reopened” alert.

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Frequent Short Outages

When a site has dropped briefly four or more times in seven days (each outage 15 minutes or less), short outages stop being alerted one by one. A new outage is alerted only if it lasts longer than 15 minutes. You are notified when this starts and when it ends.

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SSL Expiry Reminders

Sent by email and push 30, 14, 7, 3, and 1 day before the certificate expires, and on the day it expires.

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Domain Expiry Reminders

Sent by email and push 30, 14, 7, 3, and 1 day before the domain registration expires, and once after it expires.

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Server Alerts

For monitored servers, you define your own alerts: a metric (CPU, memory, disk, or network), a threshold, how long the value must hold, and a cooldown between alerts. Server alerts can use email, push, Slack, and SMS.

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Notification Preferences

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Multiple Channels

You can enable multiple notification channels for redundancy: Example configuration:

• ✅ Email - For detailed information and records
• ✅ Push - For instant mobile notifications
• ✅ Slack - For team awareness
• ☐ SMS - Reserved for critical production sites only

All enabled channels are notified at the same time.

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What Is Not Configurable

• Thresholds for website incidents (the confirmation rules above are fixed)
• Quiet hours, schedules, or maintenance windows
• Escalation chains or acknowledgement: all active channels are notified at the same time
• Extra recipients on a monitor: alerts go to each person with access, on their own channels

To stop alerts for a monitor during planned work, turn its notifications off or pause the monitor.

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Notification Limits

Each plan has daily, weekly, and monthly notification limits across all channels. When a limit is reached, further notifications are not delivered until it resets, and the account owner is told by email. Critical availability incidents are exempt, up to five per site per channel per day. In-app notifications are always recorded.

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Best Practices

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Turn Off All Notifications

Need a break or performing maintenance? You can temporarily disable all notifications:

1. Go to Notification Settings
2. Click “Turn Off All Notifications” button
3. All alerts are paused until you turn them back on

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Next Steps