DOCS

Missing notifications

Diagnose why alerts or notifications are not being delivered to your channels.

Notification was not received — quick checklist

Work through this list in order before opening a support ticket.

Check the notification log. Go to Settings > Notifications > Log. Find the incident in question and look at the delivery status for each channel. A "Delivered" status means HOWLOPS sent it; a "Failed" status shows the error.
Check channel status. Go to Settings > Notification channels. Look for any channel marked as "Error" or "Muted".
Check routing rules. Go to Settings > Alert routing. Confirm the routing rule that should match the incident is enabled and has the correct filter conditions.
Check quiet hours. Go to Settings > Notifications > Quiet hours. If quiet hours are active, notifications are held until the quiet period ends.
Check notification preferences. Go to Settings > Notifications > Preferences. Each channel and event type combination can be independently enabled or disabled.
Check Spam / Junk folder (email channels only).

Specific channel issues

Slack

Verify the webhook URL is still valid. Slack invalidates webhooks if the integration is removed or the channel is deleted. Create a new webhook and update it in HOWLOPS.
If you moved the channel to a different workspace, the webhook URL changed. Update it in HOWLOPS.

Email

Check spam and junk folders.
Add the HOWLOPS sending domain to your email allowlist or safe senders list.
If using a company email filter, ask your IT admin to whitelist the sending IP range.

PagerDuty / OpsGenie

Go to the notification log and check the error message.
Common error: invalid_key — the integration key has been rotated or deleted at the provider. Create a new one and update in HOWLOPS.
Verify the service in PagerDuty / OpsGenie is not in maintenance mode.

Generic webhook

Confirm your endpoint responds with a 2xx status code within 10 seconds.
Check your server logs for the delivery attempt around the time of the incident.
HOWLOPS retries up to 3 times (5 s, 30 s, 5 min). All three attempts appear in the notification log.
Test the endpoint with the Test button on the channel settings page.

HOWLOPS applies per-channel throttling to prevent notification storms during mass incidents. If dozens of monitors go down simultaneously, a single correlation-group incident is created instead of individual alerts. This reduces noise but can result in fewer notifications than you might expect.

Escalation policy not triggering

If the primary on-call person does not respond, escalation requires:

An escalation policy assigned to the monitor's routing rule.
The escalation policy has at least two levels.
The first-level timeout has elapsed (check the policy configuration for the timeout value).

Check the incident timeline in the incident detail view — escalation events are logged there.

Monitor recovered but no recovery notification

Recovery notifications are controlled per routing rule. Open the routing rule and verify Send recovery notification is enabled.