Notifications

SiteQwality’s notifications system has four objects and they often get confused. This page is the map.

Object	Owner	Purpose	Example
Channel (a.k.a. notification)	account	One delivery destination	”Send to #ops in our Slack”
Notification group	account	Bundle of channels attached to a monitor	”Default alerts” → email + Slack + webhook
Contact method	user (personal)	One way to reach me	”My phone for SMS”
Notification rule	user (personal)	Per-urgency delivery preferences for me	”High urgency? SMS at 0min, call at 5min”

The first two are account-wide; the last two are personal — every team member configures their own. The two layers are decoupled on purpose: the team picks “where this monitor’s alerts go” once; each engineer picks “how I personally want to be paged.”

Channels (notifications)

A channel is a single delivery destination. Each channel has a type and details specific to that type:

Type	Required `details`
`email`	`email_address`
`sms`	`country_code` (int), `phone_number`
`slack`	`integration_id` (a Slack integration UUID), `channel` (`#ops`)
`webhook`	`integration_id` (a webhook integration UUID — the URL is on the integration)
`telegram`	`telegram_integration_id`
`discord`	`discord_integration_id`
`microsoft_teams`	`teams_integration_id`

Channels for slack, webhook, telegram, discord, and microsoft_teams reference an integration — set those up first in Settings → Integrations.

Channels live inside a notification group; you don’t attach raw channels to monitors.

Notification groups

A notification group is the bag of channels you attach to a monitor. Two extra knobs let you control timing:

Field	Purpose
`delay_send_after_minutes`	Wait this long before sending the first alert. Suppresses brief flapping. Clamped 0–60.
`resend_every_minutes`	If the incident is still active and unacknowledged, re-send every N minutes. Clamped 0–60.

The delay is the cleanest way to suppress noise: if a check fails for one tick and recovers, no notification fires.

A monitor can attach to multiple groups (cap of 10 per monitor) — useful when you want a single check to alert both an internal team and a customer-facing channel.

Contact methods (per user)

Each user defines how they personally can be reached, under Settings → My profile → Contact methods:

Type	Detail
`email`	An email address (auto-populated with sign-up address).
`sms`	A verified phone number.
`phone_call`	Same number, dialed for high-urgency pages.
`slack_dm`	DM via the Slack integration.

Contact methods are not attached to monitors. They power escalation paging — when an escalation level targets target_user_ids, that user’s notification rules determine which contact methods fire.

verified indicates the user has confirmed the destination (e.g. SMS confirmation code). Unverified contact methods don’t deliver.

Notification rules (per user)

Personal preferences for “if I’m being paged at urgency X, fire this contact method after this many minutes.” Stack multiple rules at increasing delays for personal escalation:

[
  { "urgency": "high", "contact_method_id": "<sms-id>",  "delay_minutes": 0,  "position": 0 },
  { "urgency": "high", "contact_method_id": "<call-id>", "delay_minutes": 5,  "position": 1 },
  { "urgency": "high", "contact_method_id": "<email-id>","delay_minutes": 15, "position": 2 }
]

That’s: SMS me immediately, call my phone if I haven’t ack’d in 5 minutes, email me if I haven’t ack’d in 15.

urgency is high or low. Configure rules per urgency level.

How a page actually fires

Monitor flips, opens an incident.
Incident attaches to the monitor’s group_notification_ids.
For each notification group:
- Wait delay_send_after_minutes (if any).
- Fan out to every channel in the group.
If an escalation policy is wired in via the routing path, page targeted users:
- For each user, walk their notification rules for the incident’s urgency.
- Each rule waits its delay_minutes, then fires its contact method.
If no ack within the level’s timeout_minutes, advance to the next escalation level.
Optional resend_every_minutes re-fires the channel fanout in step 3.

Pricing

Email, Slack, webhook, Discord, Teams, and Telegram are included on every plan. SMS and phone call delivery cost real money (Twilio pass-through) and are billed per page on paid plans.