StatusCake

Customizing your alerts and reports with StatusCake

dev

At StatusCake a large part of what we do is reacting to current downtime with alerts and logging historical downtime within reports. Today we’d like to take a look at how users can get the most out of customizing these factors.

On our Business level plan all alerts and reports via email can be fully customized to better represent your brand and ensure that the right information needed for your team to address issues quickly and efficiently is always present.

In the image below you can get an idea of the extent to which this is possible, all of our emails the get sent out can be modified as you see fit:

emailtemps

Modifying Alerts

You can modify your alerts for Virus, Uptime, SSL, Domain, Page Speed, and Server type notifications in a range of different ways. Each template is managed individually and will apply to all notifications for the set type – you can also set test-specific changes up if there are tests that you’d rather not use the blanket default settings. For changes to all tests, you should go to the User Details section for setup, and for changes on an individual test level it’s just a case of editing the test in question and working with the three fields shown below:

mailtemps2

When editing the email’s in the User Details section you’ll be able to change colors, logos, and even the base HTML/CSS of the email. We’ve included a range of tags which can be included in the code which will grab data which can make these emails more useful and tailored to your team.

Tag Usage
||TITLE|| Displays Test Name
||SITE|| Displays Website URL
||TYPE|| Displays Test Type (HTTP/PING/DNS etc)
||QUOTE|| TestID and alert number ­ e.g ( 12345 – 1)
||REASON|| Display Cause of Downtime
||TIME|| Display total downtime length for test
||HTTPCODE|| Display the error Status Code
||TESTID|| Display the TestID on it’s own
||CHECKRATE|| Display how often the test is checked.
||HOST|| Display Hosting provider if present
||CONFIRMEDTOTAL|| Show Number of confirmations for downtime
||MESSAGE|| Display custom content set per test
||TAGS|| Include tags attributed to the test
||VALID_FROM|| Display the date from which the SSL certificate is valid (SSL only)
||VALID_UNTIL|| Display the date from which the SSL certificate is no longer valid (SSL only)

So for example, you could populate the subject field of the alert email with these tags, something like “Your Site: ||TITLE|| Is Currently Down 533 ||REASON||”

Modifying Reports

Reports will work slightly differently in that they are showing a historic downtime record for one or more tests, we can fully edit these as well in terms of appearance, title, sender address and tags, and changes will apply both to automatically and manually generated reports.

We use a different set of tags here which can be seen in the table below, bear in mind that these are report specific and will not work for alert type notifications.

Tag Usage
||CU|| Display Total Uptime percentage for tests in report
||WD|| Display Number of Tests with downtime
||WOD|| Display Number of Tests with no downtime
||TABLE|| Display Table of Tests with downtime
||UPTABLE|| Display Table of Tests with no downtime

If you’ve got questions on this or would like to know more, feel free to get in touch with our friendly support team who will gladly answer any questions you have!

Share this

More from StatusCake

In the Age of AI, Operational Memory Matters Most During Incidents

7 min read Artificial intelligence is making software easier to produce. That much is already obvious. Code that once took hours to scaffold can now be drafted in minutes. Boilerplate, integration logic, tests, refactors and small internal tools can be generated with startling speed. In some cases, even substantial pieces of implementation can be assembled quickly enough to

AI Didn’t Kill the SDLC. It Made It Harder to See

10 min read Whilst AI has compressed the visible stages of software delivery; requirements, validation, review and release discipline have not disappeared. They have been pushed into automation, runtime and governance. The real risk is not that the lifecycle is dead, but that organisations start acting as if accountability died with it. There is a now-familiar story about

When Code Becomes Cheap: The New Reliability Constraint in Software Engineering

4 min read How AI Is Shifting Software Engineering’s Primary Constraint For most of the history of software engineering, the primary constraint was production. Code was expensive, skilled engineers were scarce, and shipping features required concentrated human effort. Velocity was limited by how fast people could reason, implement, test, and deploy. That constraint shaped everything from team size,

Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 3)

5 min read Autonomous Code, Trust Boundaries, and Why Governance Now Matters More Than Ever In Part 1, we looked at how AI has reduced the cost of building monitoring tools. Then in Part 2, we explored the operational and economic burden of owning them. Now we need to talk about something deeper. Because the real shift isn’t

Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 2)

6 min read The Real Cost of Owning Monitoring Isn’t Code — It’s Everything Else In Part 1, we explored how AI has dramatically reduced the cost of building monitoring tooling. That much is clear. You can scaffold uptime checks quickly, generate alert logic in minutes, and set-up dashboards faster than most teams used to schedule the kickoff

Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 1)

5 min read AI Has Made Building Monitoring Easy. It Hasn’t Made Owning It Any Easier. A few months ago, I spoke to an engineering manager who proudly told me they had rebuilt their monitoring stack over a long weekend. They’d used AI to scaffold synthetic checks. They’d generated alert logic with dynamic thresholds. They’d then wired everything

Want to know how much website downtime costs, and the impact it can have on your business?

Find out everything you need to know in our new uptime monitoring whitepaper 2021

*By providing your email address, you agree to our privacy policy and to receive marketing communications from StatusCake.