How to Get Telegram Alerts for Downtime
Telegram's setup for this is a little more involved than Slack or Discord, there's no single "create a webhook" button, you're creating an actual bot, which is a genuinely different mechanism. But once it's done, it tends to be one of the most reliable ways to get paged: Telegram's mobile push notifications are fast and consistent, and for teams spread across countries where SMS delivery and other notification methods can be spotty, a Telegram bot often just works better than the alternatives.
This guide covers creating a Telegram bot, connecting it to Downdar, and routing your monitors to alert through it.
What You Will Need
A Downdar account, and the Telegram app, since bot creation happens through a conversation with Telegram's own bot, not a website.
Creating a Telegram Bot
Open Telegram and search for @BotFather, Telegram's official bot for creating and managing other bots. Start a chat with it and send /newbot. BotFather will ask for a name and a username for your new bot (the username has to end in "bot", something like downdar_alerts_bot works). Once you've answered both, BotFather gives you a bot token:
Keep that token private, anyone with it can control your bot and send messages as it.
Getting Your Chat ID
A bot token alone isn't enough, Telegram also needs to know where to send messages: a specific chat, group, or channel. That destination is identified by a chat ID, which you'll need to find.
If you want alerts sent to a group or channel rather than directly to you, add your new bot to that group or channel first (as a regular member for a group, or as an admin for a channel, Telegram requires bot admin access to post in channels). Then send any message in that chat, and fetch your bot's recent updates from Telegram's API to find the chat ID:
The response includes a chat object with an id field, that's your chat ID. For a group or channel, it'll typically be a negative number. If nothing shows up, make sure you sent a message in the chat after adding the bot, Telegram's getUpdates only returns recent activity.
Connecting Telegram to Downdar
Back in Downdar, go to your alert channels settings, add a new Telegram channel, and enter both the bot token and the chat ID you just found. Downdar creates an alert channel tied to that bot and destination, which you can reference by name or key when setting up monitors.
If you want alerts split across more than one destination, a group for your whole team and a private chat just for whoever's on call, you can reuse the same bot for both, you just need the chat ID for each destination, found the same way.
Routing a Monitor's Alerts to Telegram
Once the channel 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 Telegram to it without needing to recreate anything, and a monitor can list more than one channel key if you want redundancy, Telegram and email both firing for the same incident, for example.
A Note on Bot Token Security
Treat the bot token the way you'd treat any credential, it's not something to paste into a public repository, a shared document, or a support ticket. If a token ever does leak, message BotFather with /revoke for that bot to invalidate it and issue a new one, then update Downdar with the replacement.
Get Started
The bot creation step takes a couple of minutes the first time and is a one-time setup, after that, adding more destinations is just a matter of finding a new chat ID and pointing more monitors at it.