Quick start
Connect a tool to ilert, route its alerts to an on-call responder, and page yourself with a real event.
This guide takes you from an empty account to a real alert on your phone. It takes about 10 minutes.
By the end you will have:
an alert source that receives events from your tools
an escalation policy that decides who gets paged, and when
verified notification channels on your own profile
a test alert that reached you, which you then resolve
Before you begin
An ilert account. Sign up if you do not have one.
Your phone, to receive and verify notifications.
A terminal with
curl, if you want to send the test event yourself rather than through a monitoring tool.
Create an alert source
An alert source is the connection between a tool and ilert. It receives events, decides whether each one becomes an alert, and hands that alert to an escalation policy.
Select an integration
Pick the tool that will send events. Use the search box or the category filters to narrow the list.
If you are only testing, choose API — it accepts any JSON payload you send it, so you do not need a monitoring tool wired up yet. Email is the other good starting point, because almost every tool can send email.
Click Next.
Name it and assign a team
Give the alert source a name that identifies the system the alerts come from, not the tool that sends them — Checkout API tells an on-call responder more at 3am than Prometheus does.
Assigning a team is optional here, and controls who can manage the alert source and its settings. Click Next.
Choose who gets notified
Under Who should be notified about alerts?, either select an existing policy or choose Generate new escalation policy, which creates a basic policy that notifies you first.
When you select an existing policy, ilert previews the escalation chain underneath it, so you can confirm who is paged before any alert exists.
Click Next.
Choose how events are grouped
Grouping decides how many alerts a stream of events produces. Pick one:
Smart grouping (AI-powered)
Groups similar events by analyzing their content, within a grouping window you choose
Time-based grouping
Groups every event that arrives within a time window, or until the alert is accepted
Default grouping
Groups by the alert key that the integration sets
Auto-resolution is separate, and optional: it resolves alerts that stay open longer than the period you set.
None of this is permanent — change the grouping mode on the alert source at any time.
Click Continue setup.
Get your integration key
The alert source detail page has everything you need to send events.
Copy the integration key. You will send it with every event.
The integration key identifies the alert source and lets anyone who holds it create alerts in your account. Treat it like a password: keep it out of source control, and rotate it with the regenerate icon if it leaks.
Set up your notifications
An alert that pages nobody is not much use. Before you test, make sure ilert can reach you.
Open the user menu in the top right, then click Notification settings.
Add and verify a phone number under Phone number contacts if you want calls or SMS.
Under Notification rules, set what happens when a high-priority alert is assigned to you, and how it differs from a low-priority one.
Send a test event
Replace YOUR_INTEGRATION_KEY with the key you copied, and run:
Only three fields are required: integrationKey, eventType, and summary. The Events API authenticates with the integration key in the body, so there is no Authorization header.
A 202 does not mean an alert was created.
The Events API answers 202 Accepted with an empty body — your event was queued, not processed. You get no alert ID, and an event that the alert source later filters or rejects returns exactly the same 202. The outcome is recorded in the alert source's Alert source logs tab, never in the response.
Keep the correlation-id response header if you need to ask support what happened to a specific event.
For JavaScript, Python, and the full field reference, see Creating alerts through events.
Confirm it worked
Go to Alerts in the top navigation and open the alert you just created.
PENDING and escalating. The timeline records every notification sent.Check three things:
Status is
PENDING— the alert is live and escalating.Responders names the person the escalation policy picked. If your policy targets an on-call schedule, this is whoever is on call right now.
The Timeline on the right lists each notification as it goes out, including the channel it used.
Then finish the lifecycle:
Accept the alert to take ownership. This halts escalation — ilert treats an accepted alert as owned by a human and stops paging anyone else.
Resolve it when the underlying problem is fixed. A resolved alert cannot be reopened; a later event creates a new one.
If the alert reached your phone and you resolved it, your setup works end to end: a tool can now page the right person, and escalate if that person does not respond.
What's next
Last updated
Was this helpful?