Alert contacts: wire incidents to email, Telegram, or webhooks
Monitors only help when failures reach humans or automation. SitePuls stores reusable alert contacts—email addresses, Telegram chats linked through the bot flow, and HTTPS webhooks with optional secrets—then you attach them to each monitor inside the signed-in app.
Why contacts are separate from monitors
Teams reuse the same on-call email or Telegram channel across dozens of monitors. Editing a contact updates routing everywhere it is linked, which keeps hygiene better than duplicating raw addresses per check.
Email delivery
Email contacts use SMTP configuration maintained for your tenant. Delivery success still depends on recipient spam policies and provider throttling—monitor bounce behavior like any operational email.
Telegram linking
Telegram contacts go through the bot connect flow documented in the product: you add a contact, follow the secure token handshake, and wait until the chat is pending/active before incidents can deliver.
Webhooks and automation
Webhook contacts POST JSON payloads to your HTTPS endpoint. You can choose a generic schema or a Slack-compatible text payload for incoming-webhook URLs—both modes exist in the contact editor.
Security expectations
Optional webhook secrets let your receiver verify SitePuls. Treat URLs like credentials: rotate them when staff changes and log verification failures.
Compared to status pages
Public status pages communicate posture to customers; alert contacts push the same incident stream to internal responders—use both when stakeholders differ.
What SitePuls does not do
No native PagerDuty/Opsgenie OEM integration beyond what your webhook receiver implements, and no SMS provider built into the open-source core described here—stick to supported channels.
Next steps
Create contacts under Alert contacts, verify each channel with a test notification, then attach them to new monitors as you onboard URLs.
What you can verify with SitePuls here
- Alert contacts define where notifications go when monitors enter incident states you subscribe to.
- Supported contact channels in the product include email, Telegram, webhooks, and Slack-style webhook formatting.
- Notifications cover down, recovery, and degraded flows depending on monitor behaviour and your settings.
Where incident alerts can go
- Email addresses saved as alert contacts receive messages when incidents open or resolve (according to your notification settings).
- Telegram notifications via the SitePuls bot after you link a chat to an alert contact (including the bot /start flow for pending contacts).
- HTTPS webhooks that receive JSON with event type, monitor identifiers, status, timestamp, optional incident id, and a short message for generic integrations.
- Slack-compatible incoming-webhook formatting: alert contacts can use a dedicated mode so payloads match Slack-style incoming webhook expectations.
Illustrative sample — field names match the product; values are placeholders.
What a generic webhook contact receives on incidents
{
"event_type": "down",
"monitor_id": 123,
"monitor_name": "Example API",
"monitor_type": "http",
"status": "down",
"timestamp": "2026-03-31T12:00:00Z",
"message": "Last check failed (example)",
"incident_id": 456
}FAQ
Can one contact receive many monitors?
Yes—attach the same contact record to every monitor that should share routing.
Do webhooks retry?
Assume at-least-once semantics may require your endpoint to be idempotent; consult operational logs if deliveries fail.
Is Slack native?
Use webhook contacts with Slack mode for Incoming Webhook style payloads; there is no separate Slack OAuth app inside SitePuls core.
Can guests configure contacts?
Contact management requires an authenticated workspace—public marketing pages explain the model, but changes happen in-app.
What about Microsoft Teams?
If Teams exposes an HTTPS webhook connector you control, point a generic webhook contact at it; otherwise use email or Telegram today.
Do incidents always fire all contacts?
Delivery respects the monitor’s linked contacts and the product’s incident rules—configure per monitor to avoid noisy fan-out.
Can I pause alerts temporarily?
Use monitor or contact toggles available in the UI for your role; exact controls follow in-app documentation.
Where do I start?
Open Alert contacts after login, add one verified channel, attach it to a staging monitor, and trigger a controlled failure to validate the path.