What Screenly notifies on

Two events, three destinations. What is covered, what is deliberately not, and how to keep alerts worth reading.

Screen alerts are under Settings > Notifications, in Screen status alerts. Email needs no connection; Slack and PagerDuty need connecting first.

Two events, each with its own switch under Notify when:

Screens go offline.

Screens come back online.

The second matters as much as the first. Most offline screens recover on their own within minutes, and knowing that is what stops somebody driving to a site unnecessarily.

Three destinations

Email is set up per person. Each member turns it on for themselves, and it goes to that member's account email address, so what you choose only affects you.

Slack posts into a channel you choose. See Slack.

PagerDuty raises an incident, which is right when a dark screen is somebody's job at three in the morning. See PagerDuty.

You can use all three at once, and each event is switched independently per destination.

What is not notified

Content that fails to process, a schedule ending, a member joining, storage filling up. Those appear under Notifications in the sidebar, which opens them in a dialog with a count on the entry, rather than being pushed anywhere.

Those notifications are worth glancing at after a bulk upload, because a video that failed to encode is invisible everywhere else until somebody notices a gap in a rotation.

Keeping them worth reading

A screen on a flaky connection will flap, and a channel that cries wolf gets muted, which is worse than having no alerts because it feels like having them.

Two things help. Send screen alerts somewhere of their own rather than into a busy channel. And reserve PagerDuty for the screens that genuinely justify waking someone: a display in a plant control room is not the same as one in a corridor.

If a particular screen flaps constantly, that is a fault to fix rather than an alert to tune. Weak Wi-Fi is the common cause, and the screen's Details tab shows its signal strength.