Notifications & webhooks
Alpacon keeps your team informed about what’s happening across your servers: approval requests waiting on a decision, security events, monitoring alerts, and servers that go offline. Notifications appear in an in-app feed by default, and can also reach you by email, browser push, or Slack DM. Separately, a workspace can forward them to external webhook endpoints.
This page explains what triggers a notification, the channels notifications can reach, and who configures each one. For scripting webhooks, see the webhook CLI reference.
What triggers a notification
In-app notifications
Every member has a notification feed, opened from the bell icon in the top-right corner. It gathers recent activity that’s relevant to you, grouped into categories such as:
- Approvals — access and command requests waiting on a decision
- Security — unauthorized access attempts, insecure open ports, and unknown or relocated devices
- Servers—server status changes, including disconnections
- Work sessions and commands—session and privileged-command activity
- Tokens and workspace—token and workspace changes
- Monitoring—metric thresholds crossed on a server
Each item carries a severity of Info, Warning, or Critical. The feed shows your most recent items, and you can mark items as read or dismiss them. It’s available to everyone on every plan and needs no setup.
Server disconnection
Once a server has been offline for five minutes, a Critical alert appears in the in-app feed. It clears on its own when the server reconnects. This alert is not configurable: there is no threshold to tune and no channel to pick.
Monitoring rule alerts
Monitoring rules watch real-time server metrics and raise an alert when a rule’s threshold is reached. These alerts reach the dashboard and email. See Monitoring rules to define them.
Channels and where they’re configured
| Channel | What it is | Where it’s set up |
|---|---|---|
| In-app feed | The bell in the top bar, one feed per member | Always on, no setup |
| Notifications delivered to your inbox | Per member, Preferences > Notifications | |
| Browser push | Push notifications from your browser (Alpacon Cloud only) | Per member, Preferences > Notifications |
| Slack DM | A direct message from the Alpacon Slack app | Per member, Preferences > Notifications |
| Webhook | Delivery to an external endpoint: Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Telegram, or a custom URL | Integrations > Webhook, or the CLI |
Which channels carry a given notification is decided per notification type, not set workspace-wide. Each member can then mute a channel for a whole category from their own Notification preferences, reachable from the profile menu in the top-right.
Webhooks are the exception and stay workspace-level: open Workspace settings in the left sidebar, then Integrations > Webhook to manage endpoints. A webhook receives notifications once at least one endpoint is registered.
Webhooks
A webhook posts notification events to an external service so they land in a channel your team already watches. Alpacon formats each message for the destination automatically, so a Slack webhook reads as a Slack message and a Teams webhook as a Teams card. Supported destinations are Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Telegram, and custom HTTP endpoints, detected from the URL you enter.
To add one from the product:
- Go to Workspace settings > Integrations > Webhook.
- Click New webhook.
- Enter a Name and the URL. Leave Provider on auto-detect unless you need to override it, keep Verify SSL on for public endpoints, and set Enabled.
- Save.
For step-by-step provider setup, such as creating the incoming-webhook URL in Slack, Discord, Teams, or Telegram, see Webhook setup. To create and manage webhooks from the command line, including the message payload and provider options, see the webhook CLI reference.
Turning off SSL verification for a webhook exposes its messages to interception. Leave it on for any public endpoint, and disable it only for a trusted internal address or local testing.
Who can configure what
Webhooks and monitoring rules are workspace-wide: one member configures them and they apply to everyone. Your own delivery channels are personal — Preferences > Notifications lets you mute email, browser push, or Slack DM for a whole notification category, and that choice affects only you. The in-app feed is always on and cannot be muted, so nothing is ever lost by silencing a channel.
| Setting | Who can change it |
|---|---|
| Your own delivery channels (Preferences > Notifications) | Every member, for themselves |
| Webhooks (Integrations > Webhook) | Staff and Superuser |
| Monitoring rules (Integrations > Monitoring rules) | Superuser |
| Your own in-app feed | Every member |
Plan availability
Email notifications, webhooks (including Slack as a webhook destination), and monitoring rules require the Essentials plan or higher. On the Free plan the in-app feed still works, and opening Webhook or Monitoring rules shows an upgrade dialog instead. For how upgrade prompts work and where to change your plan, see Plans & billing; for the full plan lineup, see the pricing page.
Manage from the CLI
The Alpacon CLI mirrors these settings:
alpacon webhook—create, list, inspect, update, and delete webhooks, including the payload format and provider options.
Self-hosted deployments
On self-hosted deployments, browser push isn’t available, and email delivery depends on whether your deployment has email configured. The in-app feed and webhooks work on any deployment.