Contact groups & routing
Bundle people together and decide which incidents reach which channels.
Two ideas keep notifications organized: contact groups (who) and routes (which incidents go where).
Contact groups
A contact group bundles people who should be notified together — for example On-call, Platform team, or Leadership.
- Attach one or more groups to a channel.
- A channel can serve multiple groups, and a group can be on multiple channels — so the same "On-call" group can get both a Slack message and a PagerDuty page.
Routing
Routes decide which incidents reach which channels — for example:
- Critical incidents → a webhook into your on-call tooling
- Warning incidents → a Slack channel
- A specific tag or service → a dedicated team
Routes are configured centrally and take effect without a restart, so you can adjust who-gets-what as your team evolves.
A sensible starting point
New organizations are bootstrapped with a default notification path (your account email), so alerts work from day one — then you layer on chat and on-call tools as you grow.
Think in layers: a broad catch-all (email) so nothing is missed, plus targeted routes (PagerDuty for Critical) so the urgent things page the right people.