Alerting With Checkly

Comprehensive alerting and retry strategies to minimize false positives and ensure reliable incident response when your checks fail or recover.

Checkly alerts you when your checks or monitors transition between states such as passing to failing, degraded performance, or recovery. The system is designed to provide actionable notifications while minimizing noise through intelligent retry strategies and flexible escalation policies.

Benefits

• Configurable alert thresholds and escalation
• Reduce false positives with intelligent retries
• Fixed, linear, and exponential backoff options
• Multiple notification channels and integrations
• Location-based failure filtering

Alert Settings

The alert settings screen gives you the options to tailor when, how and how often you want to be alerted when a check fails at the Account Level. This is also sometimes referred to as threshold alerting. For example:

• Get an alert on the second or third failure.
• Get an alert after 5 minutes of failures.
• Get one or more reminders after a failure is triggered.

Your alert notifications can be configured at three levels:

1. Account level: This is the default level and applies to all of your check unless you override these settings at the check level.

2. Group level: You can explicitly override the alert settings at the group level.

3. Check level: You can explicitly override the account alert settings per check. Very handy for debugging or other one-off cases.

You can select whether group settings will override individual check settings for alerts, retries, scheduling, and location

Alert Channels

When adding a channel, you can select which checks to subscribe to the channel. This way you can create specific routings for specific checks.

You can also select which types of alerts should be send to your channel:

• Failure: When a check encounters a hard error.
• Degradation: When a checks is just slow, but still working.
• Recovery: When a check recovers from either failing or being degraded.
• SSL certificate expirations

Configuring alert channels is mostly self explanatory except for our advanced webhook builder.

After adding the channels, you either edit or delete them, or change which checks are subscribed to that specific channel.

If you are using Terraform or the CLI, you will need to specify alert channel subscriptions explicitly for each check / group.

Alert States

Sending out alert notifications like emails and Slack hooks depends on four factors:

1. The alert state of the check, e.g. “passing”, “degraded” or “failing”.
2. The transition between these states.
3. Your threshold alerting preferences, e.g. “alert after two failures” or “alert after 5 minutes of failures”.
4. Your notification preferences per alert channel.

As you can see, 1 and 2 are how Checkly works in the backend; you have no influence on this. But 3 and 4 are user configurable. We can even add a fifth factor: if the check is muted, no alerts are send out at all.

Note: Browser checks currently do not have a degraded state.

States & Transitions

The following table shows all states and their transitions. There are some exceptions to some of the more complex states, as the history or “vector” of the state transition influences how we alert.

✅ = passing ⚠️ = degraded ❌ = “hard” failing

transition	notification	threshold	code	notes
✅ —> ✅	None	-	NO_ALERT	Nothing to see here, keep moving
✅ —> ⚠️	Degraded	x	ALERT_DEGRADED	Send directly, if threshold is “alert after 1 failure”
✅ —> ❌	Failure	x	ALERT_FAILURE	Send directly, if threshold is “alert after 1 failure”
⚠️ —> ⚠️	Degraded	x	ALERT_DEGRADED_REMAIN	i.e. when threshold is “alert after 2 failures” or “after 5 minutes”
⚠️ —> ✅	Recovery	-	ALERT_DEGRADED_RECOVERY	Send but only if you received a degraded notification before
⚠️ —> ❌	Failure	-	ALERT_DEGRADED_FAILURE	This is an escalation, it overrides any threshold setting. We send this even if you already received degraded notifications
❌ —> ❌	Failure	x	ALERT_FAILURE_REMAIN	i.e. when threshold is “alert after 2 failures” or “after 5 minutes”
❌ —> ⚠️	Degraded	-	ALERT_FAILURE_DEGRADED	This is a deescalation, it overrides any thresholds settings. We send this even if you already received failure notifications
❌️ —> ✅	Recovery	-	ALERT_RECOVERY	Send directly

Use Checkly’s alert notification log to analyze your alerting patterns and identify opportunities to reduce noise while maintaining coverage of critical issues.