Services

A service is what catches all of your incoming alerts and routes the alerts to the appropriate escalation policy.

Create a Service

  1. On the left navigation bar, select Services.
  2. Select the + in the lower right.
  3. Fill out the requested information and select Submit.

Create Integration key

The integration key is the key (clever, I know) used by GoAlert to map API calls or inbound emails to your service for alert creation. You must have an integration key to send alerts to your service. To create this key, select Integration Key. Then, on the integration key page for your service, select the + in the lower right and give your generic API key a name.

You can use this key to create alerts via any API call, email, or with ShuttleIO. If you’d like, you can call the GoAlert API directly to create alerts. Review our API documentation at yourgoalertdomain.com/docs or under Sending Alerts within our documentation for additional information.

Alerts

On a service, you have the ability to view all alerts associated to that specific service. Next to the Alerts option on the service details page, you’ll see a green bar if there are no active alerts and a yellow bar if you have one or more alerts in an unacknowledged or acknowledged status.

By selecting Alerts on the service details page, you can see all alerts that have ever been associated to this specific service. Also, on the service’s alerts page you can Acknowledge/Close All active alerts on the service. This feature is useful when you have receive multiple alerts at the same time. To use this feature, select the ellipsis in the menu bar (upper right corner) and then select Acknowledge All Alerts or Close All Alerts. Note, this action will apply to any active alert currently associated with the service.

Assign Escalation Policy

In order for a service to send notifications, it must be associated to an escalation policy. To do this, perform the following

  1. Select the ellipsis in the menu bar (upper right corner) and then select Edit Service
  2. Search for any existing escalation policy in the Escalation Policy drop down. Note, a service can be associated with one and only one escalation policy.
  3. Select Submit to save your changes. Your escalation policy will now be listed in the top section of the Service Details page.

On-Call Users

Once you have everything you need for a service to notify people of alerts, you’ll see the people who are currently on-call and at which step in the escalation policy they will be notified in the On-Call Users table. This table is a quick way you can verify that you’ve got everything configured to send alert notifications.

Maintenance Mode

Maintenance Mode is an option located on your service’s page. It can be enabled for 1, 2, or 4 hours. During this time, all outbound notifications for that service will be paused until the maintenance mode ends. As a result, the escalation policy will also be paused for the service. Any incoming alerts will still be created. If multiple alerts are created during the maintenance mode timeframe, at the end of maintenance mode, a bundled alert notification will be sent out to the on-call user.

Heartbeat Monitors

A heartbeat monitor is a simple up/down alert that can be set up for your services(s). It creates an alert if a POST request is not received within the time window that you configure.

For example let’s say you have a critical node in some environment and want to receive an alert if this node is unavailable for 15 consecutive minutes.

In your GoAlert Service, you can click on the Heartbeat Monitor, and then set the timeout to 15 minutes. Copy the heartbeat URL that it creates. On your critical node, run a process to POST to the heartbeat URL every minute or two. If GoAlert does not receive a single POST request in the 15 minute window, an alert will be created against your service and your team will be notified according to your escalation policy.