From a failing check to the right person, automatically
Follow one signal end to end. We listen for the silence, you sleep through the night.
Create a monitor or heartbeat
Point HowlOps at the URL you care about. HTTP/HTTPS and ping monitors run on the interval you pick (as fast as 15 seconds on Uptime L), checked from our global regions. For cron jobs and background workers, use a heartbeat instead: it expects a ping on a schedule and goes down when the ping does not arrive in time.
Checks run, and failures open an alert
A single failed check does nothing on its own. A detector opens an alert only after the last few checks were all down (two consecutive failures by default, or a threshold you set). For monitors that run from several regions, you choose whether one failing region pages you or a quorum has to agree. The moment the alert opens, it shows up in your Alerts list.
The alert reaches the right people
If an escalation policy governs the alert, it pages on-call step by step, each step with its own delay and target (engineer first, then secondary, then team lead). If no policy applies, the alert is broadcast to every channel you have wired (Slack, Discord, Telegram, email, SMS, voice, webhook), with deduplication and quiet hours so one outage does not fan out into duplicate pings.
Acknowledge, silence, or promote
Acknowledge and escalation stops advancing. Silence for N minutes and it pauses, then resumes. Most noise stays a plain alert, but the ones that matter become incidents: critical alerts are promoted automatically (you can add your own rules), or you promote any alert by hand to coordinate the response.
Auto-resolve and all-clear
When the service recovers, the alert closes on its own (a multi-region monitor waits for every region to come back). The all-clear travels the same path the alert did: the people who were paged get the recovery, or the channels that received the alert do. Recovery messages are sent by default (opt-out per channel), so you can mute them where you only want to hear about problems.
Sleep through the night. We'll handle the howl.
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