First alert

You have a monitor — now make sure you actually hear about it when something breaks. This guide takes you from "no alerts" to "Slack message in five seconds" in four steps.

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1. Create a notification channel

Notification channels are the destinations HOWLOPS talks to when an incident is opened. You can have as many as you want; email and Slack are the most common starting points.

1. In the platform sidebar, open Settings → Alerting → Channels.
2. Click + New channel.
3. Pick the channel type. The fastest options for first-time setup:

Channel	What you need
Email	A team distribution list or your own inbox
Slack	Incoming webhook URL or OAuth install
Telegram	Bot token + chat ID (use @userinfobot to find your chat ID)
Webhook	Any HTTPS endpoint that accepts JSON POST

4. Save the channel. The form runs a one-shot connectivity probe — if the destination doesn't accept the test message, the save fails with a clear error.

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2. Attach the channel to an escalation policy

Channels by themselves don't alert anyone. They become useful once you place them inside an escalation policy — the rules engine that decides who gets paged, when, and in what order.

1. Open Settings → Alerting → Escalation policies.
2. Either edit the default policy or click + New policy and give it a name like Production on-call.
3. Add a Step 1: select the channel(s) you created in step 1. Leave the delay at 0 minutes — this step fires immediately.
4. Optionally add a Step 2 with a 5-minute delay and a secondary channel. This is how you ensure that if nobody acks within five minutes, a louder channel takes over.
5. Save the policy. The right-hand preview pane shows the timeline of what will fire when.

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3. Wire the policy into your monitor

Monitors hold the what to watch. Escalation policies hold the who to wake up. The link between them lives on the monitor itself.

1. Open the monitor you created in First monitor.
2. In the right rail, find the Alerting section.
3. Set Escalation policy to the one you just saved.
4. Optionally set per-severity overrides (e.g. warning events skip the second step).
5. Click Save. The monitor card now shows the policy name next to a green check.

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4. Fire a test alert

HOWLOPS ships a Send test alert action so you can verify the full pipeline before anything actually breaks in production.

1. From the monitor's detail view, click the three-dot menu → Send test alert.
2. Pick a severity (critical is the loudest — start there).
3. Confirm. Within ~2 seconds you should see:

Destination	What to look for
Email (Mailpit)	New message with subject [TEST] Monitor «name» fired
Slack	Channel post with red severity badge + "Acknowledge" button
Telegram	Bot message with inline ack/resolve buttons
Webhook	POST to your endpoint with full incident JSON

If you don't see the message:

1. Open the monitor's Activity tab — the test send is recorded there with delivery status per channel.
2. Open Settings → Alerting → Logs for the platform-wide delivery audit (last 7 days).
3. For Slack/Telegram, re-run the channel's connectivity probe from step 1 — most failures are revoked tokens.

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What's next

• Concepts → On-call & escalations — how rotations and overrides work
• Tutorials → Slack alerts in 5 minutes — a deeper Slack walkthrough with rich message templates
• How-to → Manage notification channels — adding webhooks, PagerDuty, and Discord