Uptime alerts in Slack and Discord: a setup guide

Email is fine for a lot of things, but a downtime alert buried in an inbox is easy to miss. Routing uptime alerts into Slack or Discord puts incidents where your team already looks, so someone sees them within seconds. Here is how to set it up.

The idea: incoming webhooks

Both Slack and Discord support "incoming webhooks", a private URL that posts a message into one channel when something sends it data. You create the webhook once, paste the URL into PageWarden, and every incident and recovery lands in that channel automatically. No bots to install, no OAuth dance.

Each webhook is tied to a single channel, so pick the channel first: an #alerts or #incidents channel that the right people already watch.

Slack

1. In Slack, open the app directory and add Incoming Webhooks.
2. Choose the channel the alerts should post to, then copy the webhook URL Slack gives you (it starts with https://hooks.slack.com/).
3. In PageWarden, go to Alerts, select Add channel, choose Slack, and paste the URL.
4. Open the new channel's menu and choose Send test to confirm a message appears.

To alert more than one Slack channel, add a separate Slack channel in PageWarden for each webhook.

Discord

1. In Discord, open Server Settings → Integrations → Webhooks and select New Webhook.
2. Choose the channel it should post to, give it a name like PageWarden, and select Copy Webhook URL.
3. In PageWarden, go to Alerts → Add channel → Discord, and paste the URL.
4. Use Send test from the channel's menu to confirm it works.

Anyone who can see the channel will see the alerts, so choose the channel with that in mind.

Route the right monitors to the right channel

A channel is not much use if it is not attached to anything. In PageWarden, each channel is a card on the Alerts screen: select Edit on the Slack or Discord card, tick the monitors that should alert to it, and select Done. You might send everything to one #alerts channel, or route one client's sites to their own channel. You can also mark a channel as a default so it attaches to new monitors automatically.

When you want your own tooling: webhooks

Slack and Discord are the ready-made options. If you want to pipe incidents into your own system (a PagerDuty bridge, a database, a custom dashboard), use a webhook channel instead. PageWarden sends a POST request with a JSON body describing the monitor, the event, and the time whenever an incident starts or resolves, so you can build against a predictable shape. A test send uses the same format.

A note on noise

The reason chat alerts work is that they are rare and trustworthy. PageWarden only alerts once a failure is confirmed across multiple regions, so a brief network blip never reaches your channel. When a message lands in #incidents, something is genuinely wrong and worth interrupting for. How loudly it should interrupt depends on the incident's severity level.

Chat alerts are on every paid plan. Start free and add your first Slack or Discord channel in a couple of minutes, or read the full alerts documentation for every channel type.