Beacon

Integrations

Alert Channels

Alert channels send incidents, monitor outages, maintenance and expiry warnings to the tools your team already watches. Add them under Settings → Alerts. Owner and admin emails are sent as before, whatever channels you add.

Events

Each channel chooses which events it receives. New channels get incident opened/resolved, monitor down/recovered and warnings.

  • incident_opened, incident_updated, incident_resolved — from the dashboard, the API, playbooks, Slack and automatic resolves.
  • monitor_down, monitor_recovered — a monitor crosses its failure threshold or passes again. Monitor outages always count as critical. A channel subscribed to both monitor_down and incident_opened gets one alert per outage, not two.
  • maintenance_scheduled — a maintenance window is created.
  • warning — heads-ups such as SSL certificate or domain expiry.

By default a channel covers every status page. Tick "Only for selected status pages" to limit it. Warnings that are not tied to a page go to every channel subscribed to warnings.

Delivery and retries

Alerts are queued and sent in the background, so a slow or broken channel never holds up an incident. Timeouts, 429s and 5xx responses are retried up to 5 times (after 10s, 1m, 5m and 15m). Other 4xx responses, such as a deleted webhook, are not retried. Each channel shows when it last delivered and the last error. Use "Send test alert" to check a channel straight away.

Slack

There are three ways to connect Slack:

  • Add to Slack (any plan) — when the Beacon Slack app is enabled, click "Add to Slack" on Settings → Alerts, pick a channel and approve. Beacon creates a Slack alert channel named after the channel and workspace. Repeat it for more channels or workspaces. On Pro, if Slack isn't connected yet, this also turns on threaded updates, the Resolve button and /beacon. To remove it, delete the channel in Beacon; the "manage it in Slack" link removes the webhook on Slack's side.
  • Incoming webhook (any plan) — create an app at api.slack.com/apps, turn on Incoming Webhooks, add one for your channel and paste the https://hooks.slack.com/services/… URL. Messages use Block Kit.
  • Slack app (Pro) — the OAuth app under Settings → Slack integration threads updates under the original message and adds a Resolve button and the /beacon command. It works the same as before.

Discord

When the Beacon Discord app is enabled, click "Add to Discord" on Settings → Alerts, pick a server and channel and approve. Beacon saves the webhook Discord creates. Or, in Discord go to Server Settings → Integrations → Webhooks → New Webhook and paste the webhook URL. Alerts arrive as embeds coloured by severity: red for critical, orange for major, yellow for minor and warnings, blue for info, green for resolved.

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft is retiring Office 365 connectors (the old "Incoming Webhook" connector), so use Workflows. In the channel, open ⋯ (More options) → Workflows → "Post to a channel when a webhook request is received", name it, confirm the team and channel, click Add workflow and copy the URL. It ends in .logic.azure.com or .api.powerplatform.com. Beacon sends an Adaptive Card. Legacy webhook.office.com URLs still work until Microsoft turns them off.

Telegram

Create a bot with @BotFather and copy its token, then add the bot to your group or channel. For the chat ID, use the numeric ID (groups start with -100) or @channelname for public channels. Messages are sent as MarkdownV2.

Generic webhook

Beacon POSTs JSON to your URL and signs it the same way as status page webhooks: X-Beacon-Signature: sha256=HMAC(secret, "{timestamp}.{body}") with X-Beacon-Timestamp. The event header is alert.<event>, and the body has an alert object with event, title, message, severity, dedup_key, url, status_page_id and fields. Leave the secret blank to have one generated; you can reveal it from the channel list.

PagerDuty (Pro)

In PagerDuty, add an "Events API V2" integration to a service and copy the 32-character integration key. Beacon triggers on incident opened, monitor down, maintenance and warnings, and resolves the same PagerDuty incident when the Beacon incident is resolved or the monitor recovers. The dedup key is beacon-incident-<id>. Plain incident updates and scheduled maintenance are not sent to PagerDuty. A test alert triggers and immediately resolves.

Opsgenie (Pro)

Add an "API" integration in Opsgenie, copy its API key and pick the region your account is in: US (api.opsgenie.com) or EU (api.eu.opsgenie.com). Beacon creates an alert with the incident key as its alias, adds incident updates as notes and closes the alert on resolution. Scheduled maintenance is not sent, and test alerts are closed straight away. Critical maps to P1, major to P2, minor to P3 and info to P5.

SMS and phone calls (Pro, Twilio)

SMS and voice channels use your own Twilio account: the Account SID, auth token, a Twilio "from" number and up to 5 numbers to alert, all in +E.164 format. SMS channels text every subscribed event. Phone call channels read the alert aloud and only call when a critical alert starts (a critical incident opening, every monitor outage, critical warnings). Updates and resolutions never ring.

To avoid surprise bills from a flapping monitor, each workspace can send at most 30 texts and calls per hour across all channels and on-call paging. Anything over the limit is skipped and shown as the channel's last error.

Plans

Free workspaces can add 2 alert channels from Slack (incoming webhook), Discord, Microsoft Teams, Telegram and generic webhooks. Pro has no channel limit and adds PagerDuty, Opsgenie, SMS and phone calls. If a workspace drops back to Free, its Pro-only channels stop sending until it upgrades again.