Alerts & remote notifications

Get an early warning before trouble becomes an outage; pushed to Telegram, LINE, Slack, Discord, ntfy, email, SMS, WhatsApp and more, on whatever messaging app you already check. Bring in a supervisor or on-site technician too, with timed escalation.

Catch problems before they page you

FrontierStack runs a continuous monitor sweep across everything you've told it to watch; sites, services, the fleet and connected cloud accounts; and turns the first sign of trouble into a message on whatever app you already check. The goal is early warning: a certificate that expires in nine days, a disk filling toward its limit, a payment gateway that starts throwing disputes; caught while you can still act, not after an outage.

What it watches

• Site & service health; HTTP/loopback checks, TCP ports, and deeper protocol probes (SMTP/IMAP login, a database SELECT 1, an LDAP bind), so a service that's listening but actually broken still trips.
• Certificates & domains; TLS expiry across the whole fleet plus registrar / DNS / SSL checks warn you days ahead, not on the morning a domain lapses.
• Security exposure; new open ports or unexpected listeners, and a VPN tunnel drop, raise an alert the moment they change.
• Connected cloud services; live monitors for Stripe, Shopify, WooCommerce, Freshdesk, SendGrid and more fire when a metric crosses a threshold you set (open tickets, disputes, bounces, failed payments…).
• Contracts out for signature; e-signature monitors for Docusign, Adobe Acrobat Sign, Dropbox Sign, PandaDoc, Zoho Sign, Yousign, CloudSign, GMO Sign, Modusign, DocuSeal, Documenso and more count what's waiting on signers and alert when a contract is declined, expires or fails.
• Capacity & the fleet; a node going down, backups failing, or a render / cache node dropping out of a cluster.

Bring the tools you already run into the same alert picture

Dedicated read-only connections for Paessler PRTG, NinjaOne, Atera, Site24x7 and AppSignal put their health summaries beside FrontierStack's own server checks. FrontierStack keeps API secrets in the macOS Keychain, bounds every response and requests monitoring access only. It can raise a FrontierStack alert from vendor-reported trouble, but it never acknowledges or closes the vendor's alert, runs a remote job, patches an endpoint, starts maintenance or changes the vendor configuration.

Warn before, not after

Most checks are threshold-based, so you decide what "trouble" means: alert when a certificate is within N days of expiry, when open tickets pass a number, when a disk crosses a percentage. Choose conservative thresholds and the message lands while there's still time to fix the cause; that's the difference between a heads-up and a post-mortem.

History you can trust

The collapsible Local Health board puts homelab services, linked servers, network devices and cloud APIs on one screen; any group with a failed item opens automatically. Every row has a 30-check red/green history and measured response-time sparkline, plus rolling observed uptime for 24 hours, 7 days and 30 days. Coverage is separate, so app-off, paused and out-of-network time is never counted as healthy. A bounded 31-day fleet event log records first observations, outages and recoveries without storing endpoints, credentials or response bodies.

Pushed to your preferred messaging method

Open the Alerts pane, switch on the channels you actually use, paste a token or webhook URL, and send a test. You can enable several at once and list multiple recipients per channel, so the right people are reached on the app they already have open:

• Telegram, LINE, Slack and Discord; a bot token or incoming webhook; multiple chats / channels per gateway.
• ntfy; push to your phone via the public server or your own self-hosted ntfy.
• Apprise; one extra hop that fans out to 80+ destinations (Pushover, Matrix, Gotify, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty and many more).
• Email (SMTP) and SMS / WhatsApp (via Twilio, or the WhatsApp Business Cloud API) for anything that has to reach a phone directly.
• KakaoTalk and Apple Messages (iMessage) for a "send it to me" alert straight from your Mac.

Tell other people too, and escalate

The channels above reach you. Real incidents often need someone else: a supervisor who wants an email, a second support person, or the technician who has to go to the site. Alerts ▸ Contacts & Escalation handles this in three parts:

• Contacts; the people, each with a role and only the addresses you'll use: email, mobile number (SMS and phone calls), WhatsApp, Telegram, Messages, ntfy, LINE or IFTTT. Addresses are kept in the Keychain.
• Presets; a reusable "who gets told, how, and when", with optional instructions added to every message ("Go to the server room, rack B, and check the UPS"). Start from a template such as Email the supervisor, page the on-site tech or Tech now, supervisor if not fixed in 30 min.
• Rules; which alerts use which preset: every alert, a category, a location, or one monitored item. Every matching rule applies, and anyone named by two rules is told once.

A delayed step is an escalation: it goes out only if the item is still down and nobody has pressed Acknowledge (in the pane, or Ack in the Alerts palette). A phone call reads the alert aloud through your Twilio number. People who were told something broke are told when it's fixed, and nobody is phoned for good news. Contacts reuse the gateways you've already set up with their own address in place of yours, so there are no extra credentials, and those gateways can stay off for your own alerts. Test sends every step of a preset at once, marked TEST.

Reliable by design

A short cooldown means a transient network hiccup doesn't spam you, and every send is verified: if a gateway fails, FrontierStack records it in a Delivery Errors list with plain-English fix-it guidance and a one-tap jump to the misconfigured channel, plus a red badge on the Dock and sidebar so you actually notice. Tokens and webhooks live in the macOS Keychain and never leave your Mac.

This is the web edition of FrontierStack's in-app Help. Open the same topic inside the app for live, clickable controls.

More help topics

• Getting started
• Hosting websites
• Databases & credentials
• Fleet & Remote Tools
• Security & firewall
• SIEM & security data
• Automation, Shortcuts & Siri
• iPhone & iPad app
• Malware Audit
• The AI Administrator
• Agent platforms
• Presets & the sidebar
• Installing & connecting services