Alerts

Getting told when a screen goes offline, by email, Slack, or PagerDuty, and how to keep the alerts worth reading.

The event Screenly notifies on is a screen going offline, and its recovery. That is the one that needs a person.

There is no alert for content failing to process, a schedule ending, or a member joining. Those appear under Notifications in the sidebar.

Choosing where alerts go

Under Settings > Notifications, in Screen status alerts. Each event has its own switch under Notify when.

Email is set up per person: each member turns it on for themselves, and it goes to their account email address. Slack posts into a channel you choose. PagerDuty raises an incident, which is right when a dark screen is something somebody is on call for. Slack and PagerDuty need connecting first under Integrations. The full list of events and destinations is in What Screenly notifies on.

You can use more than one at once.

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.

Recovery notifications matter as much as failures. Most offline screens come back on their own within minutes, and knowing that is what stops someone driving to a site unnecessarily.