Wire Up Your First Notification

What you'll learn

In this tutorial, you'll wire up a notification channel and attach it to a monitor so you actually get alerted when something breaks. A monitor without a notification channel is a tree falling in the woods — the data is there, but no one hears about it until they open the dashboard. By the end you'll have a working alert path you can verify with a single test endpoint.

This tutorial uses email because it's the channel that needs the least setup. The wiring is the same for Slack, Discord, PagerDuty, Telegram, webhooks, and every other channel — only the channel-specific config field changes. The notification reference lists each channel's exact configuration.

Prerequisites

• An openstatus account (openstatus.dev)
• At least one monitor (see Create Your First Monitor)
• An email address you can read right now

What you'll build

By the end of this tutorial, you'll have:

• An email notification channel created in openstatus
• The channel attached to one of your monitors
• A clear understanding of what triggers a notification and what doesn't

1. Create a notification channel

Navigate to Settings > Notification Channels in the dashboard and click Create Notification Channel.

Pick Email as the channel type and fill in two fields:

• Name — how the channel shows up in the dashboard. Use something self-descriptive like On-call email or Engineering alerts. You'll see this name on every monitor it's attached to.
• Email address — the recipient. Use an address you can check right now so you can verify the alert arrives.

Save the channel. It's now created but not yet attached to anything — no notifications will fire.

2. Attach the channel to a monitor

Open one of your monitors and go to its Notifications tab. Select the channel you just created and save.

That's the wiring done. From now on, when the monitor transitions into a failing state — down or degraded — your channel will receive a notification. When the monitor recovers, you'll get a recovery notification too.

Checkpoint: the monitor's notification tab should now show the channel listed. If it doesn't appear in the dropdown, refresh the page once — newly created channels can take a moment to propagate to the monitor settings.

3. Trigger a test alert

The fastest way to see a real notification is to point a monitor at an endpoint that's guaranteed to fail, and let it run for a few checks.

Create (or temporarily reconfigure) a monitor with these settings:

• URL: https://openstat.us/500 — a public test endpoint that always responds 500 Internal Server Error.
• Frequency: 1 minute — so you don't have to wait long.
• Notification channel: the one you just created.

Wait a couple of minutes. Once enough consecutive checks have failed to cross the trigger threshold (50% of recent checks — see Incident Reference), openstatus opens an incident and fires the notification.

Check the inbox you used in step 1. You should see an alert with the monitor name, the URL, the status code, and a link back to the dashboard. Delete the test monitor — or point it back at a real URL — once you've confirmed the email arrived.

What you've accomplished

• Created an email notification channel
• Attached it to a monitor and confirmed an alert lands end-to-end
• Learned that channels are workspace-scoped and reusable across monitors
• Seen first-hand how the trigger threshold delays the first alert (this is the feature, not a bug — it prevents flapping)

What's next?

Now you have one alert path working. From here:

• Set up the Slack agent — turn alerts into a two-way conversation where you can also create and resolve incidents from Slack.
• Open your first status report — when an alert fires, communicate the incident to your users.

Learn more

• Notification Channels Reference — every channel type, its config fields, and (for webhooks) the payload schema.
• Incident Reference — exactly what triggers a notification and the lifecycle states an incident goes through.