---
title: Warning and Critical alert severities
description: Not every alert deserves to wake someone up. HTTP status, body-match and SSL alert rules can now be set to Warning or Critical, so a heads-up and a real…
canonical: https://watchfor.io/changelog/2026-04-23-alert-severities
---

[All updates](/changelog/page/10#2026-04-23-alert-severities) ✨ New Apr 23, 2026 · v 1.0.0

# Warning and Critical alert severities

Not every alert deserves to wake someone up. HTTP status, body-match and SSL alert rules can now be set to Warning or Critical, so a heads-up and a real outage no longer look the same. Pick the severity when you create or edit a rule.

## Two levels

- Critical is a hard failure: the site is unreachable, the status code is wrong, the certificate is invalid. A confirmed critical incident shows the monitor as Down .

- Warning is worth knowing but not worth waking up for: slower responses, a certificate getting close to expiry. The monitor shows Degraded , and your channels are still told.

## What the level changes

- Each notification channel has its own severity filter, so one channel can take criticals only while another gets both.

- Only critical incidents count against your uptime. A warning never lowers it.

## Example

Response time already has two levels: a warning at 2 seconds and a critical at 5. On a busy afternoon pages take 2.4 seconds. Your team channel gets a message and the monitor shows Degraded, but the channel you keep for real outages stays quiet. If responses reach 6 seconds, a critical incident opens, the monitor shows Down and that channel fires too.

## Where to set it

Pick the severity when you create or edit an HTTP status, body match or SSL rule in a monitor's Alerting tab. Today every rule has a severity. See [Severity](/docs/alerting#severity).

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Canonical page: https://watchfor.io/changelog/2026-04-23-alert-severities · Site guide: https://watchfor.io/llms.txt