# Alerts and destinations

> Alerts are how InfraNest tells you when something needs attention — a monitor down, a certificate expiring, a domain about to lapse.

Source: https://infranest.io/docs/alerts
Last updated: 2026-10-26

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Alerts are how InfraNest tells you when something needs attention — a monitor down, a certificate expiring, a domain about to lapse. This article is for anyone setting up where those alerts should go and how they should behave.

## Overview
- You set up **destinations** — places alerts are delivered, like email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Telegram, Discord or a webhook — once, under **Destinations**.
- You then choose which alerts go to which destination, per monitor, server, DNS zone or domain, and even by severity.
- Destinations can be personal or shared with your organisation, and everything is also mirrored in the in-app notifications bell.

## Add a destination
1. Go to **Alerts → Destinations**.
2. Select **Add destination** (or **Add your first destination** if you have none yet).
3. Choose the type: **Discord**, **Slack**, **Microsoft Teams**, **Telegram**, **Telegram (Custom Bot)**, or an email/webhook option such as **Send alerts to any email address** or **Page your on-call via PagerDuty**.
4. Fill in the fields for that type — for example **Destination name**, **Email format**, **Incoming webhook URL**, **Slack webhook URL**, **Integration key (routing key)**, **Telegram bot token** or **Chat ID**.
5. Select **Save & test** to confirm it works, or **Send test** from the destination afterwards.

> [!TIP]
> Use **How to get your Chat ID** or **Open Slack App Directory** if you're not sure where to find the ID or key a destination needs.

## Choose where alerts go
1. Open the monitor, server, DNS zone or domain you want to configure.
2. Go to its alert settings and review **Event subscriptions**.
3. Attach the destinations you want — choose **All events**, **Critical only**, or **Critical only outside {from}–{to}** for quiet hours.
4. Select **Save** to apply.

> [!NOTE]
> A destination set to **Critical only** or with quiet hours still receives the all-clear for any outage it was told about, so it never looks like something is still down after it has recovered.

## Manage an existing destination
1. Go to **Alerts → Destinations**.
2. Select a destination to see its status — **Active**, **Inactive**, or **Alerts are not reaching this destination** if something's wrong.
3. Choose **Edit destination** to change its settings, **Send test** to check delivery, or **Delete destination** to remove it.
4. If it's broken, check the guidance under *A destination says it is not delivering* — it's marked **Not delivering**, keeps retrying automatically, and meanwhile sends affected alerts to its owner by email instead.

## A daily list in your team channel
1. Open the Slack or Teams destination.
2. Find the **"Needs you" digest** option.
3. Choose daily or weekly delivery.

Alerts keep arriving as they happen; the digest is a calm summary alongside them.

## Stop getting one kind of alert by email
1. Open the alert email you want to stop.
2. Scroll to the link at the bottom.
   - If it was sent to your own personal destination, it says **Disable this notification** — click it to stop just that kind of alert for you. Your mail app's own unsubscribe button does the same thing.
   - If it was sent to a shared address, there's no unsubscribe link on purpose. Instead it links to **Manage this alert destination**, taking you to the destination so someone can change it deliberately.
3. To turn a personal notification back on, go to your account settings → **Notifications** and select **Turn back on** next to it.

## Silence a noisy server from the email
1. Open a server alert email (a metric over threshold, or a server that stopped reporting).
2. Select the option to silence that server for 60 minutes.
3. Confirm on the page that opens — nothing is silenced until you press the button there.

While silenced, the server is still being watched, and everything else keeps alerting normally. The window appears under **Monitoring → Maintenance**, named after the server, so your team can see it and end it early. The link works for a week, then stops.

## Activity
1. Go to **Alerts → Activity**.
2. Review the timeline of alerts sent — what fired, when, and where it went — to confirm delivery or check recent history.

## Filter or route alert emails
1. Note that down and recovery emails for the same incident share one subject line, so don't filter on words like "DOWN".
2. Instead, filter using the List-Id each alert carries, for example `alert-monitoring-down` for a monitor going down, or `alert-domain-expiry` for an expiring domain.
3. In Gmail, search or filter with `list:alert-monitoring-down.alerts.infranest.io`.
4. In Outlook, create a rule with **Message header includes** and the relevant text.
5. In Apple Mail, go to **Settings → Rules**, add a condition, choose **Edit Header List…**, add `List-Id`, then filter on it.

## Let alerts through Focus, or mark them VIP
1. Add `alerts@notify.infranest.io` to your contacts — this address sends alerts; `digest@notify.infranest.io` sends summaries, so you can treat them differently.
2. On iPhone or iPad: open an alert in Mail, tap the sender, choose **Add to VIP**; to allow alerts through a Focus, go to **Settings → Focus →** your Focus **→ People** and add the contact.
3. In Gmail: create a filter for **From** `alerts@notify.infranest.io` and tick **Never send it to Spam** and **Always mark it as important**.
4. In Outlook: with Focused Inbox on, right-click an alert and choose **Always move to Focused**.

> [!WARNING]
> Don't apply the same VIP or Focus treatment to `digest@notify.infranest.io` unless you want summaries to break through too — keeping them separate is what makes alerts stand out.

## Tips
- If an email destination matches your own address, you only get one email per alert, with **Acknowledge** and **Silence 1 h** buttons included — even if you've personally switched that kind of email off.
- When a monitor's down email shows a **Likely cause**, click **See it** to open the audit log on that one change, or **Show the whole log** to see everything else.
- If the monitor is on a status page, use the **Post an update** link in the down email to update visitors directly from the incident.

## Troubleshooting
- **A new monitor shows "has not worked yet"** — this means it's never had a single successful check, so InfraNest doesn't treat it as an outage. Check the monitor's URL and expected status; once one check succeeds, future failures are reported normally.
- **A destination says it's not delivering** — the service is turning alerts away (for example, a revoked key or regenerated webhook URL). It stays switched on and will recover automatically once fixed; affected alerts are emailed to the destination's owner in the meantime.
- **Conversation view isn't grouping alert emails** — this only works if conversation view is switched on in your mail app (in Gmail: gear icon → **Email threading** → **Conversation view**).

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