Notification rules decide what gets sent, to whom, on which channel, and when — so important events reach the right people without drowning everyone in noise.
Channels
| Channel | Good for |
|---|---|
| General alerts and summaries. | |
| SMS / voice | High-severity, after-hours escalation. |
| Webhook | Custom automation and internal tools. |
| Chat (Slack, Teams) | Team-visible, real-time awareness. |
| ITSM / ticketing | Turning alerts into tracked work items. |
Build a rule
Choose a source & threshold
Pick what the rule listens to — a product, a site, a severity — for example "SD-WAN site down" or "high-severity SOC case."
Pick recipients & channel
Send to a person, a team, or an on-call group, on one or more channels.
Set timing
Add a schedule and quiet hours — route criticals to SMS overnight, batch the rest into a morning digest.
Test it
Fire a test notification to confirm it lands where you expect before you rely on it.
Reduce noise
- Severity thresholds — only notify above a level; log the rest.
- Grouping & digests — bundle related alerts into one message.
- Deduplication — a flapping link doesn't send fifty texts.
- Escalation — if no one acknowledges in n minutes, escalate to the next contact; overnight, that next contact can be after-hours network operations coverage.
Tip
Send everything to a chat channel for visibility, but reserve SMS/voice for genuine criticals with an escalation chain. That keeps day-to-day awareness high without training people to ignore their phones.
Notification rules can also be managed through the API.