How to Get Discord Alerts for Downtime

A lot of indie teams, small studios, and open source projects never adopted Slack in the first place, Discord is already where the team talks, where support happens, sometimes where the whole community lives. Routing downtime alerts to a tool nobody's actually in defeats the point of having them. If Discord is where your team already is, that's where the alert should go too.

This guide covers connecting Discord to Downdar and routing your monitors to alert there.

What You Will Need

A Downdar account, and permission to manage webhooks in the Discord server you want alerts sent to. This requires the "Manage Webhooks" permission on the server, which server owners have by default and can grant to others.

Connecting Discord to Downdar

Discord alerts work through a webhook, the same underlying idea as Slack's, though Discord's is set up entirely from within Discord itself rather than a separate developer site. In the Discord channel you want alerts posted to, open Channel Settings, go to Integrations, and create a new Webhook. Give it a name (something like "Downdar Alerts" makes it obvious later what it's for), and Discord generates a webhook URL for that channel:

Copy that URL.

Back in Downdar, go to your alert channels settings, add a new Discord channel, and paste the webhook URL in. That's the whole connection, nothing to install or authorize inside Discord beyond creating the webhook itself. Downdar creates an alert channel tied to that webhook, which you can reference by name or key when setting up monitors.

If you want alerts split across more than one channel, say, a #status channel visible to your whole community and a smaller #eng-alerts channel just for the team, each one needs its own webhook created in Discord, then added to Downdar the same way.

Routing a Monitor's Alerts to Discord

Once the webhook is connected, attach it to a monitor using alert_channel_keys, either when creating the monitor or by updating an existing one:

Updating an existing monitor with the same key attaches Discord to it without needing to recreate anything, and a monitor can list more than one channel key if you want it posting to Discord and also emailing someone, for instance.

Deciding What Goes to a Public Channel

If your Discord server includes a community or customer-facing space, think carefully before wiring internal monitors straight into a public channel. A public #status channel that automatically posts every blip, including ones your team resolves in under a minute, can end up making your service look less stable than it actually is, even though the alerting itself is working exactly as intended. It's usually worth keeping a public channel focused on genuine, customer-visible incidents, and routing the smaller, routine stuff to a private channel your team monitors instead.

What Happens When a Monitor Changes State

A connected Discord channel gets a message the moment a monitor's status changes, both when something goes down and when it recovers. Don't skip wiring up the recovery notification even if it feels redundant, a team that only ever sees "down" messages and never sees "back up" tends to keep worrying about an issue well after it's actually resolved.

Get Started

Set up the webhook, connect it in Downdar, and attach it to whichever monitor would actually matter if your team missed it. Add the rest once you've confirmed the first alert shows up where you expect.