Uptime alerts in Telegram

Setting it up

1. In Telegram, message @BotFather, send /newbot, pick a name and a username, and copy the token it gives.
2. Add the bot to the group, or to the channel as an admin that can post messages. For alerts to yourself, open the bot and press Start.
3. Find the chat ID, as below.
4. In StatOSS, open Account, Alerts, choose Telegram under "Add a destination", paste the token and the chat ID, tick the pages whose alerts go there, and add it.
5. Press "Send a test" next to it.

Telegram is on Hobby ($4 a month) and Pro. Email alerts are on every plan, Free included. The pricing page has the rest.

Finding the chat ID

Send a message in the chat, then open https://api.telegram.org/bot<token>/getUpdates in a browser with your token in place. The ID is the number under chat, id. A person's ID is a positive number; a group's or a channel's starts with a minus sign. A public channel can be given as its @name instead.

What the message says

The alert's first line in bold, then the monitor, the URL, the reason and the time, and a link to the public page. Link previews are off. When Telegram refuses an alert, the test and the delivery record say why: the chat was not found, the bot was blocked or removed, or the token is not valid. The token is stored encrypted and not shown again; the dashboard names the destination by its chat.

When an alert goes out

One alert per change of state: when a monitor goes down, when it turns slow, and when it is back, with the time, the reason, and how long it was out. A monitor counts as down after two failed checks in a row, each confirmed by a second server on another network; a single failed check sends nothing. A repeat interval sends a "still down" notice every so many minutes while an outage lasts, and nothing is sent during a maintenance window. Every kind of monitor alerts the same way: a website, an API, a port, a certificate, a cron job.