Slack is the channel for teams that handle outages in a shared channel. UptimeWire posts one message when a website goes down and one when it comes back, so everyone in the channel sees the same thing at the same time.

Note

The Slack channel is built and tested against a strict stand-in for the Slack service. A real message to a live Slack workspace has not been independently confirmed yet. Use the test message to check it in your own workspace.

Slack is a trademark of its owner. UptimeWire is not affiliated with or endorsed by Slack.

What it carries

Outage and recovery alerts. Certificate, domain, and DNS warnings are not sent to Slack. They arrive by email and Telegram.

Set it up

UptimeWire does not install into your workspace. Instead, you give it the address of an incoming webhook that you make yourself.

  1. Open your Slack apps and create an app from scratch in your workspace.
  2. Under Incoming Webhooks, turn them on and press Add New Webhook to Workspace.
  3. Choose the channel, allow it, and copy the address that starts with https://hooks.slack.com/services/.

Then, in your UptimeWire account, open the notification settings of your profile, paste the address into the Slack card, and press "Connect". Press "Send test message" to see a message arrive in the channel.

Only the account owner can add, change, test, or remove the address. The address is one per account, so the same Slack channel receives alerts for every website. Paste the address exactly as Slack gives it.

What a message looks like

Each alert is one message with a heading that reads Shop is down with a red marker, or Shop is back up with a green one. Below it are the website address, the cause (for an outage), how long it was down (for a recovery), and the time the incident started in UTC. Two links, "Open site" and "Open incident", follow.

Mentions and link previews are switched off, so an alert never pings people. Text that comes from a website is treated as plain text.

Delivery and limits

  • Messages to one address are sent one second apart.
  • If Slack refuses a message, or no longer accepts the address, UptimeWire does not retry, and the log shows "The service no longer accepts this address: connect it again" with Slack's own short error code. For other failures, it tries up to five times: at once, then after 1, 5, 30, and 120 minutes.
  • The delivery log in your account shows the last five Slack messages and what happened to each.
  • From the Business plan. If an account moves to a plan without Slack, waiting alerts are cancelled. The address is kept and works again after an upgrade.
  • An alert can, in rare cases, arrive twice.

Troubleshooting

  • UptimeWire says this is not a Slack address. Paste the address exactly as Slack gives it. It must start with https://hooks.slack.com/services/.
  • The test message did not arrive. Read the result next to the test button. A short Slack error code such as an archived channel or an invalid token is shown there. Fix it in Slack, or make a new webhook and connect it again.
  • Messages stopped after someone removed the app. The address stops working. Make a new webhook and connect it.
  • You need SSL, domain, or DNS warnings. Use email or Telegram for those.