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Notification channels are the delivery destinations that PulseGuard uses to reach your team when an alert rule fires. You create channels once and then attach them to as many alert rules as you need across any number of monitors. PulseGuard supports six channel types — covering everything from a personal inbox to a custom webhook endpoint that feeds your own incident tooling.

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Supported Channel Types

PulseGuard delivers alerts over six distinct transports. Each has its own configuration requirements and message format tailored to that medium. You can create multiple channels of the same type — for example, two separate Slack channels, one for a general ops feed and one for a critical-only on-call channel.
PulseGuard delivers alerts via Resend, a transactional email API. Emails are rendered as rich HTML using React Email templates and include all the context your team needs to act without opening the dashboard.What each email contains:
  • Monitor name and target URL
  • Current status (DOWN or UP) and the previous status
  • Detected latency (or 0 for connection failures)
  • Error reason (for example, CONNECTION_REFUSED or SSL_HANDSHAKE_FAILED)
  • Downtime duration on recovery emails
  • Failed regions, if the outage was isolated to specific locations
  • A link to your runbook, if one is configured on the monitor
How to configure:
  1. Navigate to Settings → Notification Channels and click New Channel.
  2. Select Email as the channel type.
  3. Enter the destination email address. This can be any address — it does not need to match your PulseGuard account email.
  4. Click Save.
PulseGuard also automatically emails the monitor owner’s account address when a matching alert rule fires, regardless of whether an explicit Email channel is attached. Configure a dedicated Email channel when you want alerts sent to a shared inbox, a distribution list, or a different address entirely.
The Slack integration sends Block Kit messages — structured, interactive notifications that go beyond plain text. Downtime alerts include action buttons so your team can acknowledge or resolve an incident directly from Slack without switching to the dashboard.What each Slack message contains:
  • Alert header with emoji status indicator
  • Target URL and current status
  • Alert details and error reason
  • Downtime duration on recovery messages
  • Failed regions, if applicable
  • A link to your runbook, if configured
  • Action buttons on incident alerts: View Dashboard, Acknowledge, and Resolve
How to configure:
  1. Navigate to Settings → Notification Channels and click New Channel.
  2. Select Slack as the channel type.
  3. Click Authorize with Slack to start the OAuth flow. You will be redirected to Slack to approve the PulseGuard app for your workspace.
  4. After authorization, select the Slack channel where alerts should be posted.
  5. Click Save.
Create a dedicated #pulseguard-alerts channel and route all critical monitors there, then use a separate channel for lower-severity or informational alerts. This makes it easier to triage noise from signal.
The Discord integration posts rich embedded messages to any Discord channel via an incoming webhook. Embeds are color-coded by status: red for DOWN, green for UP/recovered, and orange for high-latency or SSL expiry warnings.What each Discord embed contains:
  • Color-coded status bar (red / green / orange)
  • Title with emoji and monitor name
  • Description with the error reason or recovery message
  • Inline fields: target URL, timestamp, downtime duration
  • Failed regions field, if applicable
  • Runbook link, if configured
How to configure:
  1. In Discord, open your server’s Server Settings → Integrations → Webhooks.
  2. Click New Webhook, choose the target channel, and copy the webhook URL.
  3. In PulseGuard, navigate to Settings → Notification Channels and click New Channel.
  4. Select Discord as the channel type.
  5. Paste the webhook URL into the Discord Webhook URL field.
  6. Click Save.
The Webhook channel lets you integrate PulseGuard with any system that can receive an HTTPS POST request — incident management platforms, custom scripts, log aggregators, or your own internal tooling.PulseGuard sends a POST request with a Content-Type: application/json header and the following payload shape:
How to configure:
  1. Navigate to Settings → Notification Channels and click New Channel.
  2. Select Webhook as the channel type.
  3. Enter the destination URL. The URL must use HTTPS.
  4. Click Save.
Your endpoint must respond with a 2xx status code within the request timeout window. PulseGuard will log delivery failures, but failed webhook deliveries are not automatically retried — ensure your endpoint is reliable and returns promptly.
The Telegram integration sends formatted text messages to any Telegram chat — personal, group, or channel — through a bot you control.What each Telegram message contains:
  • Monitor name and current status
  • Target URL
  • Error reason and timestamp
  • Downtime duration on recovery messages
How to configure:
  1. Open Telegram and start a conversation with @BotFather.
  2. Send /newbot and follow the prompts to create a new bot. Copy the bot token BotFather provides.
  3. Add the bot to the target chat (group or channel), or start a direct conversation with the bot.
  4. Retrieve your chat ID. For a personal chat, you can get this by sending a message to your bot and calling https://api.telegram.org/bot<your-token>/getUpdates — the chat.id field in the response is your chat ID. For groups, add the bot and use the same method.
  5. In PulseGuard, navigate to Settings → Notification Channels and click New Channel.
  6. Select Telegram as the channel type.
  7. Enter the Bot Token and Chat ID.
  8. Click Save.
The SMS channel sends brief plain-text messages to any phone number, providing an ultra-low-friction alert path for on-call engineers who may not have app notifications enabled.What each SMS contains:
  • Monitor name and status (DOWN or UP)
  • Brief error reason, if available
  • Timestamp
How to configure:
  1. Navigate to Settings → Notification Channels and click New Channel.
  2. Select SMS as the channel type.
  3. Enter the destination phone number in E.164 format (for example, +14155552671).
  4. Click Save.
SMS delivery is subject to carrier routing and regional availability. For time-critical on-call workflows, pair SMS with a Slack or webhook channel to ensure delivery redundancy.

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Testing a Channel

Before relying on a channel in production, send a test notification to confirm delivery end-to-end. Test notifications exercise the full delivery pipeline — they go through the same notification handler as live alerts.
1

Open the channel

Navigate to Settings → Notification Channels and click the channel you want to test.
2

Send a test notification

Click Send Test Notification. PulseGuard immediately dispatches a sample alert payload to the configured destination using the current channel configuration. The test exercises the full notification pipeline, so delivery confirms your channel is correctly set up end-to-end.
3

Verify delivery

Check the destination — your inbox, Slack channel, Discord server, webhook logs, Telegram chat, or SMS inbox — and confirm the message arrived with the expected format.
4

Review delivery logs

If the test notification does not arrive, open Settings → Notification Channels → Delivery Logs to inspect the raw response from the downstream service. Common issues include expired OAuth tokens (Slack), incorrect webhook URLs (Discord), or invalid bot tokens (Telegram).
Run a test notification any time you update a channel’s configuration — for example, after rotating a Slack token or changing a webhook URL — to confirm the new settings are valid before the next real alert fires.