Alerts and notifications are the backbone of any Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tool, ensuring your team is immediately aware of critical issues. At AppSignal, we’re always improving our toolkit to help you stay ahead of problems before they impact performance or reliability.
We've made huge improvements to how you can manage your app notifications and alerts with AppSignal. In this post, we'll introduce you to our notifier feature and show you how you can manage all your organization's app notifications.
With the latest updates, instead of managing your notifiers on an app-per-app basis, you can now configure them at the organization level and manage notifications for all apps within your organization in one centralized location. Plus, you can set up default notifiers that automatically apply to any new apps you add to your organization — saving you the extra setup.
Receiving Notifications from AppSignal
When AppSignal encounters an issue, it can notify you via your preferred notifier — for example, Slack.
So, for example, if an error is raised in your production app, AppSignal can ping you via your #error Slack channel, so that you can get to work on an issue before it impacts users, performance, or availability.
Your notification frequency can be configured to match your needs and prevent notification fatigue. You can configure AppSignal to notify you:
Notification Frequencies
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Every Occurrence | Sends a notification each time the event occurs, ensuring that you're alerted every time the issue or event happens, regardless of how frequent it is. |
| First in Deploy | Sends a notification only the first time the event happens during a deployment. This is useful for monitoring new releases or changes without receiving multiple alerts for the same issue within the same deployment. |
| First After Close | Triggers a notification only for the first occurrence of an event after an issue has been closed. This ensures that once a problem is resolved, you'll be notified only when it reappears. |
| Never Notify | Disables notifications for the event entirely, which can be useful for events that don't require alerts, such as minor or known issues that don't impact performance. |
| Every Nth per Hour/Day | Sends notifications at regular intervals, either every Nth occurrence within an hour or a day, reducing alert fatigue by limiting how often you're notified for frequent events. |
How to Manage Notifications with AppSignal
Managing your notifiers with AppSignal is straightforward. Organization admins can create and configure notifiers from one simple interface.
1. Manage Notifier Settings
To start, head over to Organization Settings > Notifications > Notifiers. Once you're there, select the notifier you want to configure. Here, you can easily adjust the notifier's name and, for email notifications, set the reminder interval — essentially, how often AppSignal sends you a notification when an alert is still open.
2. Manage Notifier Scope
Notifiers can now be scoped to specific applications or environments. This means you can decide exactly where and when a notifier should apply. For example, you can scope a notifier so that it only triggers for your production apps, so you're not overwhelmed with notifications from development or staging environments.
3. Set a Notifier as the Default for New Applications
We wanted to make setting up new apps with AppSignal even easier by introducing default notifiers. When you set a notifier as the default, AppSignal automatically applies it each time a new app is added to your organization.
4. Manage Notifier Events
You're in control of exactly what types of events trigger notifications. Whether it's deploys, errors, or performance issues, you can fine-tune which events your notifier responds to.
You can also scope notifications for specific namespaces, adding additional flexibility and specificity to your notifiers, allowing them to be configured in a way that makes sense to your stack.
Supported Notifiers
AppSignal supports a variety of notifiers that integrate with popular communication and alerting tools. These integrations ensure you never miss a critical issue, whether it's an error, performance issue, or deployment anomaly.
AppSignal currently supports:
- Discord: Connect your AppSignal account to Discord to receive notifications directly in your channels — ideal for teams that rely on Discord for communication.
- Google Hangouts Chat: Send notifications to your Google Hangouts Chat rooms — perfect for teams using Google's suite of tools for integrated, real-time alerts.
- Microsoft Teams: For teams using Microsoft Teams, AppSignal integrates with your workspace to send notifications directly to your Teams channels, keeping your team informed of critical incidents.
- OpsGenie: With OpsGenie's integration, your team can be automatically alerted about critical incidents, making it easier to manage urgent issues and responses.
- PagerDuty: PagerDuty's integration with AppSignal ensures that when a performance drop or error occurs, the right person gets notified, helping your team respond quickly.
- Slack: AppSignal's Slack integration brings notifications directly to your channels, allowing your team to stay updated about deployments, errors, and performance issues in real time.
- Squadcast: With the Squadcast integration, you can get incident reports via Phone call, SMS, Email, and Push notifications.
- Webhook: With Webhooks, AppSignal can connect to custom or third-party alerting services. You can integrate with a wide range of external tools to expand your notification options.
Additionally, Webhooks allow you to connect to several third-party services, such as:
For a complete list of all third-party integrations, refer to our Integrations Documentation.
Get Notified the Right Way with AppSignal
Developers use AppSignal because it cuts through the noise and helps you stay ahead of performance issues and errors, so you're not distracted by constant notifications.
With even more control over how and when you're alerted, you'll be able to focus on what really matters: building and improving your app.
AppSignal makes it possible to:
Manage notifiers across all your apps at the organization level.
Set default notifiers for any new apps you add, no extra setup required.
Tweak your notifications to avoid alert fatigue, only getting notified for what matters.
Integrate with popular tools like Slack, Discord, and PagerDuty.
Ready to streamline your notifications and stay on top of what matters? Contact us to learn more or sign up for a free trial and see how AppSignal can help you optimize your app's performance and reliability.
