Updated 25 October 2026 · By the Upcertain team
Where the noise comes from
- Unconfirmed failures: one dropped request, one alert.
- Every event as its own message: down, still down, still down, flapping up and down.
- Everything in one channel: the marketing site, staging and the payment API side by side.
- Cascades: one shared dependency fails and twenty monitors alert separately.
- Alerts nobody can act on: sent to people who do not own the service.
Rule 1: confirm before you post
Re-check before an incident opens. One confirmation check after 15 seconds removes most single-request blips; services whose deploys fail for a minute need a longer window. The confirmation guide has the arithmetic.
Rule 2: one incident, two messages
An outage should produce a down message and a recovery message in the same channel, and nothing else unless someone asks for reminders. Upcertain posts reminders only when you set a repeat interval, and acknowledging the incident stops them on every channel.
Rule 3: route by owner
Create one channel per team or per service area and let each monitor pick its channels. The payments team sees payments alerts; the web team sees the website. Staging monitors go to a quieter channel, or to email only.
Rule 4: group cascades
When a database or DNS provider fails, everything behind it fails within a minute. Alert grouping turns that into a single message listing every affected monitor, so the first responder sees the shape of the problem instead of scrolling.
Rule 5: delay where speed does not matter
Not every channel needs to hear at once. Keep the on-duty channel immediate and delay a wider channel by a few minutes; short blips resolve before the delayed alert is due, and the wider group only hears about real outages.
Rule 6: make each message self-explanatory
A good alert answers what, since when and why in the first line: "Down: payments-api, HTTP 503, since 09:13". It links to the incident and the place to acknowledge. Upcertain's Slack alerts carry the cause, the start time and buttons to acknowledge or view the incident.
A monthly check-up
- Count the alerts in the channel last month and how many needed action.
- For every alert that needed none, change one setting: confirmation, delay, routing or the monitor itself.
- Delete monitors for things nobody would fix.
A channel where most messages need someone to act is a channel people keep reading. That is the whole goal.