Overview of Contacts

To skip to a specific section of the "Contacts, Integrations, and Alert Escalations" video, click the links with the !

Table of Contents

• Alerting Methods
• The Contacts Screen
  • Creating and Editing Contacts
• Adding Contacts to a Check

Alerting Methods

Return

Depending on how the contact is configured, individuals or teams associated with each contact will be notified of a downtime incident via:

• Email
• SMS message and/or phone call
• Push notifications through a third-party provider

Please Note: the number of SMS messages/phone calls you receive may be limited based on the monitoring plan you’ve selected for your account. To view your subscription plan and limits, as Account Owner navigate to Settings > Billing & Subscriptions.

For a step-by-step explanation of a common scenario that involves setting up contacts and escalation policies to send alerts to your team, we suggest seeing our how-to guide: How Do I Send My Team/Manager Alerts For Extended Outages? 

The Contacts Screen

Return

The Contacts Screen is used to add new contacts, or edit existing ones. Along with a contact’s Name, Email/Phone, and/or Integrations assigned, you can see the number of Checks and Escalations configured.

To access the Contact Screen, click Notifications > Contacts. 

To perform actions related to your Contacts, click the More Actions button. Actions available from this menu include:

• Edit Contact
• Test contact:  simulate a test alert email, SMS message, phone call, or to test an Integration profile to ensure your contact is receiving proper notifications.
• Delete Contact

Creating and Editing Contacts

Return

Skip to 0:42

The illustration below shows the fields that are displayed when adding/editing a contact, which include the name, email, SMS/phone number, or integration profile. Furthermore, you’re able to add multiple email addresses and SMS numbers to a single contact group if needed.

It is also possible to send UP alerts to only the email address and/or integration assigned to a contact if you tick the box Send UP alerts via email and integration only.

Skip to 1:04

The Integrations button will assign your third-party push notification profiles such as PagerDuty, VictorOps, etc. You must setup and then assign a contact to a push notification profile before it can receive alerts.

You can also assign On-Call Hours, which are set according to your account's preferred timezone, to designate which staff should receive notifications and at what time periods. On-Call schedules can be set weekly by day, or monthly by single day or date range. For tips and ideas, see our article on Smart Escalations. 

The seconds on the time are not shown, however, 23:59 is essentially 23:59:59.

Adding Contacts to a Check

Return

Skip to 2:50

Return to a Check’s Edit screen and assign the contact(s) that you created into the Contacts field to be notified of a downtime event.

You can also assign contacts in bulk.

Note: It is possible to create a check that does not have any contacts assigned to it. Such a check will log alerts but not send them to a contact unless and until a contact has been added to the check or as an escalation. 

Want to see our checks in action? Check out our YouTube Library for more!