Notification Channels

Overview

Alert channels define where notifications are sent when a monitor detects a failure or recovery. MonitorHound supports email, SMS, and webhook channels.

Channel types

Email

Email is the default alert channel. When you create an account, your registration email is automatically added as an alert channel.

To add additional email channels:

1. Go to Channels in the sidebar
2. Click Add Channel > Email
3. Enter the email address
4. Assign the channel to monitors

Email alerts include the monitor name, failure details, and a link to the monitor dashboard.

SMS

SMS alerts deliver notifications directly to a phone number. They are useful for urgent alerts that need immediate attention.

Coming soon — SMS notifications are not yet available. This feature is planned for a future release.

SMS alerts will be available on Standard, Premium, and Enterprise plans.

Webhook

Webhook alerts send an HTTP POST request to a URL you specify. They are useful for integrating with chat tools (Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams), incident management platforms (PagerDuty, Opsgenie), or custom automation.

The webhook payload includes:

{
  "event": "alert",
  "alert_id": "abc123",
  "monitor_id": "mon_xyz",
  "organization_id": "org_456",
  "run_id": "run_789",
  "triggered_at": "2026-02-18T10:30:00Z",
  "details": {
    "monitor_name": "API Health Check",
    "previous_state": "healthy",
    "new_state": "unhealthy"
  },
  "is_test": false
}

HMAC-SHA256 signing

If you configure a webhook secret, MonitorHound signs every payload with HMAC-SHA256 and includes the signature in the X-MonitorHound-Signature header. To verify the signature on your server, compute the HMAC-SHA256 of the raw request body using your secret and compare it to the header value.

Webhook alerts are available on all plans, including Free.

Assigning channels to monitors

Each monitor can have multiple alert channels assigned. When a failure is confirmed, notifications are sent to all assigned channels simultaneously.

To assign channels:

1. Open the monitor settings
2. Scroll to Alert Channels
3. Select the channels to receive alerts
4. Save changes

Alert behavior

• Failure alerts are sent when a failure is confirmed across check locations
• Recovery alerts are sent when the monitor returns to a healthy state
• Duplicate suppression prevents repeated alerts for the same ongoing incident