Docs / Alerts

Destinations

Alerts 5 min read

Add, test, and manage the places Uptimeprobe sends your alerts, and read the delivery history when something doesn't arrive.

A destination is somewhere Uptimeprobe sends your alerts. Add one and every probe in the workspace starts reporting to it, filtered by the statuses you pick.

Add a destination

Open Alerts, switch to the Destinations tab, then choose Add destination.

FieldWhat it doesNotes
TypeHow the alert is deliveredWebhook today
NameA label so you can tell destinations apartRequired, 1 to 255 characters
Endpoint URLWhere the request is sentMust be a public https:// URL, up to 2048 characters
Notify onWhich status changes to sendAny of Down, Degraded, Up. Defaults to Down and Up

A workspace can hold up to 20 destinations. Alerting is included at no extra cost: you pay per probe, and destinations aren’t metered.

When you save a webhook destination, Uptimeprobe generates a signing secret and shows it once. Copy it before closing the panel: it can’t be shown again, and you need it to verify that incoming requests are genuinely from us. If you lose it, rotate it and update your endpoint.

The endpoint has to be reachable from the public internet, over HTTPS. Addresses on private networks are rejected when you save the destination and re-checked before every send, so a URL that later starts resolving to a private address stops being delivered to.

Test it before you need it

Send test delivers a sample notification immediately and reports what your endpoint said. Use it when you first set a destination up, and again after you change anything on the receiving end.

A test is a real request with a real signature, so it exercises everything a genuine alert does. It carries an obviously fake probe (named “Test notification”) so nobody goes looking for an outage that doesn’t exist, and it doesn’t appear in your delivery history.

Pause without deleting

Disable stops delivery while keeping the destination and its history. Anything queued for a disabled destination is dropped rather than held, so re-enabling won’t replay a backlog of stale alerts at you. Use it during planned maintenance, or while you’re rebuilding the endpoint.

Deleting a destination removes its delivery history too.

Delivery history

Every destination keeps a log of what was sent to it, under Delivery history on the row. Each entry shows the status of the attempt, the HTTP status your endpoint returned, how many attempts it took, and the error if there was one.

StatusWhat it means
DeliveredYour endpoint accepted it.
QueuedWaiting to be sent.
SendingIn flight right now.
RetryingAn attempt failed and another is scheduled.
Gave upWe stopped trying. The reason is on the entry.

When delivery fails

A failed delivery is retried several times with a widening gap between attempts, over a few hours. That rides out a deploy, a restart, or a short outage on your side without losing the alert.

Some failures aren’t worth retrying, and those stop immediately: a 404 on the endpoint, a rejected authentication, or a URL that no longer passes the public-address check. In each case the alert is marked “Gave up” with the reason, so the delivery history tells you what to fix.

After repeated failed notifications, Uptimeprobe turns the destination off and shows a banner explaining why. This stops a deleted endpoint from being retried forever. Fix the endpoint, then Enable the destination, which clears the warning and starts a fresh run of attempts.

If an alert never arrives

Work through it in this order:

  1. Check the Activity tab. If there’s no entry, the probe’s status didn’t change, and nothing was meant to be sent.
  2. Check the destination’s Notify on filter. A destination set to Down and Up ignores a move into Degraded.
  3. Check the destination is enabled and not auto-disabled.
  4. Check the Delivery history. If the attempt is there, the answer your endpoint gave is there too.

Rotate a signing secret

Rotate secret issues a new one and shows it once. There’s no overlap period: the old secret stops working the moment you rotate, so update your endpoint in the same sitting. Anything queued but not yet delivered is signed with the new secret.

Rotate whenever the secret might have leaked: a shared log, a screenshot, someone leaving the team.

Who can change destinations

Any workspace member can see the destinations and their delivery history. Adding, editing, testing, rotating, and removing are limited to workspace owners and admins.

Next steps

See Webhook payloads for the request Uptimeprobe sends and how to verify its signature, or Alerts for what creates an alert in the first place.