Alerts
How Telescope decides when to alert you and how it avoids noise.
Telescope alerts you when a monitor goes down and again when it recovers. The alert system is designed to minimize noise — you won't get paged for a single transient timeout.
How alerts fire
Alerts are threshold-based. A single failed check doesn't trigger an alert. Instead, Telescope waits for multiple consecutive failures before notifying you:
| Check | Result | Consecutive failures | Alert? |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Down | 1 | No — below threshold |
| 2 | Down | 2 | No — below threshold |
| 3 | Down | 3 | Yes — alert created |
| 4 | Down | 4 | No — already alerted |
| 5 | Up | 0 | Recovery alert |
The default threshold is 3 consecutive failures before alerting. You can adjust this per monitor — set it lower for critical services or higher for flaky endpoints.
Alert types
| Alert | Severity | When it fires |
|---|---|---|
| Monitor down | Critical | Your monitor has failed enough times to cross the alert threshold |
| Monitor degraded | Warning | Your monitor is being blocked by a WAF or firewall (site is up, but blocking the checker) |
| Monitor recovered | Info | Your monitor is back up after being down or degraded |
No duplicate alerts
Once an alert fires for a monitor, Telescope won't create another one for the same issue. If your site is down for an hour, you get one alert — not one per check.
A new alert is only created after the monitor recovers and then goes down again.
Automatic recovery
When a monitor comes back up after being in a failure state:
- All active alerts for that monitor are automatically resolved.
- A recovered notification is sent so you know the issue is over.
- The failure counter resets to zero.
You don't need to manually acknowledge or close alerts — Telescope handles the full lifecycle.
Degraded vs. down
Telescope distinguishes between a site that's down (returning errors or unreachable) and one that's degraded (up but blocking the monitoring request due to a firewall).
A degraded alert is a warning, not a critical alert. It tells you Telescope can't reliably check your site, usually because a WAF is blocking automated requests. See HTTP Monitoring — WAF Detection for how to fix this.
Where alerts are delivered
Every alert is delivered through the notification channels you connect — email, Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, SMS, or a voice call. See Notification channels to connect them and route the right alerts to the right people.