Route the Right Alerts to the Right Channels

Not all alerts have the same urgency. A production site going down at 3am needs to wake someone up. The same issue on a staging server can wait until morning. A domain expiring in 30 days is a handle-it-this-week item. An SSL certificate warning belongs in an inbox. ServerVisor gives you a layered system to make sure each alert reaches the right person, at the right time, through the right channel.

Channels

A notification channel is a single delivery destination. Channels can be SMS, email, Slack, Discord, or any integration that accepts a webhook. Each channel has per-event toggles that control which alert types it receives.

The four groups of events you can control per channel are:

• Uptime: Site down, Site recovered
• SSL: SSL warning, SSL expired
• Domain: Domain expiring, Domain verification lost, Domain verification passed
• Node Insights: Insights alert

Turning off SSL warnings on an SMS channel means SSL events skip that channel silently. They still reach any other channel that has the toggle on. This is the most direct form of routing — each channel tells the system exactly what it wants to hear.

Two layers of control

Per-channel toggles work alongside account-level notification preferences. Account-level settings are a global on/off switch for each event type. If SSL warnings are disabled at the account level, no channel receives them regardless of per-channel settings. Per-channel toggles then decide, for events the account allows, which individual channels receive them.

Notification groups

Once you have channels, you can bundle them into a notification group. A group is a named collection of channels that you assign to monitors instead of assigning individual channels one at a time. When an alert fires, every channel in the group receives it.

Groups are how you avoid repeating yourself. A "Production team" group might include an SMS channel for on-call and a Slack channel for team visibility. Attach that group to all your production monitors and you're done. If your on-call rotation changes, you update the group once and every monitor follows.

Escalation chains

Groups handle where alerts go. Escalation chains handle what happens if no one responds.

An escalation chain is a series of tiers. When a monitor fires, the first tier's channels are notified immediately. If the incident is not acknowledged within the configured window, the chain fires the next tier. This continues until someone acknowledges or the chain runs out.

A practical example: tier 1 notifies your team Slack channel immediately. If no one acknowledges within 10 minutes, tier 2 sends an SMS to the on-call engineer. If the incident is still open after 30 minutes, tier 3 pages the backup. Attach the chain to a monitor instead of a group and the escalation logic runs automatically.

Routing rules

Routing rules add time-based routing on top of what channels and escalation chains provide. A rule can route alerts differently depending on when they fire. Business hours to Slack, nights and weekends to SMS. Rules are assigned to monitors and evaluated at alert time.

For most setups, channels and groups are enough to start. Routing rules become useful when your team has different availability windows and you want the system to handle routing automatically rather than relying on everyone to check Slack at 2am.

A setup that works

Here is how the scenarios from the top of this article map to specific ServerVisor features:

• Production downtime at 3am: use an escalation chain. Tier 1 pings Slack immediately, tier 2 sends SMS after 10 minutes if the incident is unacknowledged.
• Staging downtime that can wait: a notification group with Slack only. No SMS, no escalation.
• Domain and SSL events: an email channel with only domain and SSL event types enabled. No interruption — handled during business hours.

How to configure alert notifications

Head to the Alerts page and open the Channels tab. Supported integrations are listed there: Slack, Discord, email, SMS, and others. Click Add channel, pick your integration, and give it a name. Most chat tools need a webhook URL. Slack uses an integration key. Email and SMS just need an address or phone number. Once saved, use the Send test option to confirm delivery before the channel handles a real incident.

The channel row shows a Notifies on column with toggleable pills for each event type. Flip the ones you want and leave the rest off. To assign a channel to multiple monitors at once, bundle it into a notification group under the Groups tab and attach the group to monitors in bulk. Escalation chains and routing rules in the remaining tabs add the timing and conditional routing described above.