Joining the workspace only gives someone access. To have them emailed when something breaks, add them to alert recipients, to a monitor group's alert emails, or to an escalation policy as described below.
Invite your teammates
- In the dashboard, open Team members and click Invite member.
- Enter their email address. They get an invitation link and must sign in or sign up with that same address to accept.
- Every plan includes unlimited team members.
Choose who receives alerts
Pick whichever of these fits how your team works. You can combine them.
- Alert recipients: open Alert recipients in the sidebar to see, per monitor, who gets alert emails, and add or remove addresses.
- Monitor groups: give a group its own alert emails and every monitor in that group alerts those people. New monitors added to the group pick them up automatically.
- Escalation policies (Growth and above): under Alerting & On-call, add an email step addressed to a person or to the current on-call. Later steps fire if nobody acknowledges.
The workspace owner's account email is added automatically at sign-up and receives email alerts for every monitor. Each address gets one email per alert, even if it appears in several of these lists. If none of a monitor's addresses can receive alerts, SutramX emails the account that owns the monitor, so an outage is never silent.
Add recipients to a monitor
- Go to Alert recipients in the dashboard, or open a monitor and choose Notify team members… from its menu.
- Find the monitor and click Edit.
- Under Team emails, tick the teammates who should get this monitor's alerts.
- Under Other addresses, type any other address (for example oncall@example.com) and click Add email.
- Click Save alert recipients. To cover a whole group at once, use Edit group emails on the group row instead.
Recipients outside your workspace
You can also send alerts to an address that is not a workspace member, such as a shared ops inbox. Alerts only go to verified addresses: a new address gets a one-time confirmation email, while teammates with a verified account email are verified automatically.
The confirmation email names your workspace and who added the address. The recipient clicks "Yes, send me alerts" or declines. Until then the address shows Pending verification and gets nothing. Confirmation links last 72 hours, and you can resend one after 10 minutes. A workspace can send up to 50 confirmation emails per 24 hours, and one address can receive up to 5 per 24 hours across all workspaces.
What an alert email contains
- Down alert: subject "Monitor down: <monitor name>", with the monitor, URL, status, time detected, region and status code, an Error details box with the failure reason, and a View incident button.
- Recovery: subject "Monitor recovered: <monitor name>", with the monitor, URL, status, time recovered and total downtime.
- Escalation: subject "Incident still open: <monitor name>", with the escalation step, how long the incident has been open, the current on-call person and an Acknowledge incident button.
- SSL and domain expiry: for example "SSL certificate expiry in 7 days: <monitor name>", only when the SSL Certificate Expiry preference is on (it is off by default).
Every alert email has an unsubscribe link and a one-click unsubscribe header. An address that unsubscribes shows Unsubscribed and stops receiving alerts from that workspace; only the recipient can resubscribe.
Email and on-call
Escalation policies are on Growth and Pro. An email step can go to a fixed address or to the current on-call person. On-call schedules, which decide who that is, are on Pro: members take turns in list order for the rotation interval you set (for example 168 hours for weekly shifts), with optional shift windows and holiday overrides. On-call members need an address that can receive alerts, so anyone without a verified account email must confirm first.
If an email step cannot be delivered (nobody is on call, the recipient has not confirmed, or the email fails) and you have PagerDuty connected, SutramX pages your first PagerDuty connection instead.
Test and troubleshoot
To test, open a monitor, open its menu and choose Send test notification. SutramX emails the monitor's first alert recipient with the subject "Test alert: <monitor name>".
- A colleague got nothing: they are probably Pending verification, or they are a team member who was never added to the monitor, its group or an escalation policy. Check the Alert recipients page.
- No recovery email: recovery emails need the Monitor Recovery Alerts preference on, and a recovery is only sent if the down alert went out.
- An alert came late: a maintenance window, quiet hours or a dependency may have held it back. The incident's Notifications list shows every attempt and the reason for any skip.
- A distribution list: add its address under Other addresses. Someone with access to that inbox must click the confirmation link.
Common questions
Is there a per-seat charge for team members?
No. Every plan includes unlimited team members, and email alerts are on every plan, Free included.
Can I get alerts on my phone without email?
Yes. Browser push (also on every plan) shows a notification on desktop and on phones that support web push. On iPhone and iPad, add SutramX to the Home Screen first. Telegram and Discord also reach a phone in seconds.
All plans, Free included. Compare plans on the pricing page, or see all integrations.
Other incident and developer integrations
- Opsgenie alerts setup: Create and auto-close alerts with an API integration key.
- GitHub issues alerts setup: Open an issue on downtime, close it on recovery.
- Webhooks alerts setup: Signed JSON events to your own HTTPS endpoint.
Related reading
- Features: Alerting & Escalation
- Guides: Reducing False Alerts, Incident Response Basics and On-Call Rotation
- Documentation: Email & push and Team members & roles
- More from SutramX: Uptime on Your Phone