Alert rules
Turn raw check results into a clear "is this a problem?" — with presets and severities.
A monitor watches; an alert rule decides what counts as a problem. Rules live on each monitor's Alerting tab.
Presets, not blank pages
Most monitor types ship with presets tuned for that type, so you rarely build a rule from scratch:
- HTTP → site is down · slow response · body match failed
- SSL → certificate expiring · certificate invalid
- DNS → resolution failure · unexpected records
- Ping → unreachable · high latency · packet loss
…and so on for every type. Turn the ones you want on, adjust thresholds, and you're done. When only one preset makes sense for a type, it's expanded for you.
Severity
Every rule is Warning or Critical. Severity flows through to incidents, your status page and your notifications, so the urgent things stand out from the merely noteworthy.
🟠 Warning
Worth knowing about — degraded performance, an approaching expiry.
🔴 Critical
Needs attention now — a hard outage, an invalid certificate.
Thresholds and conditions
Rules compare a measured value against a threshold you set — for example "response time over 2s", "certificate expires in under 14 days", or "status code is 5xx". Defaults are sensible; tune them to your service's normal behaviour to avoid noise.
What happens when a rule matches
A matched rule doesn't page you on the first blip. The result is confirmed across locations first, and only then does an incident open and notifications go out.
Changing a rule is tracked. If a rule changes after an incident started, the incident's root cause shows the version that was in effect when it fired — so diagnostics stay honest.
Repeat reminders
By default WatchFor notifies you once when an incident opens — no repeat spam. If you'd rather be reminded while something stays broken, open a monitor's Alerting tab and set Repeat reminders while down to every 1, 6, 12 or 24 hours. Reminders stop automatically the moment you acknowledge the incident or it resolves, so you're never chased about something you're already on.