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Concepts

Spectate turns a failed check into an alert, and an escalation path decides who gets the alert. People work on bigger problems in an incident and tell customers on a status page. This page explains each part and how one leads to the next.

From a failed check to a status page

1. A monitor watches one target, for example https://example.com/health, from one region.
2. A check is one run of a monitor. Spectate runs a check at each interval, for example every 60 seconds.
3. If a check fails, Spectate checks again about 5 seconds later from the same region. If that check also fails, the monitor is down.
4. Spectate fires an alert: "Website is down", with the severity critical.
5. The alert follows one or more escalation paths. A path is a list of steps: notify a channel, page the person on call, wait, or create an incident.
6. A channel delivers the notification: email, Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Telegram, webhook, Pushover, SMS or a voice call.
7. A person acknowledges the alert. Escalation stops, and the next steps do not run.
8. If the problem needs more work, the team declares an incident, or an escalation step creates one.
9. The team publishes the incident on a status page, and subscribers get an email.
10. When a check succeeds again, Spectate resolves the alert and sends a resolved notification.

Monitors are one source of alerts. Hosts, domains, status pages and alert sources such as Grafana or Sentry also fire alerts. All alerts follow escalation paths in the same way.

Alerts and incidents

An alert and an incident are different things in Spectate. An alert is a signal from a machine. An incident is the work of people.

Not every alert needs an incident. A certificate that expires in 14 days is an alert. A checkout page that is down for all customers is an incident.

Spectate deduplicates alerts. While an alert for a problem is firing, the same problem does not fire a second alert. Each alert runs from a copy of its escalation path, made when the alert fires. If you change a path, only new alerts use the change.

Severities, from high to low: critical, high, medium, low. See Alerts and Incidents.

Which escalation paths an alert follows

Spectate looks for escalation paths in this order and uses the first level that has paths:

1. The paths set on the monitor, host, domain or status page itself.
2. The paths of its project.
3. The team default path.

If none of these exist, the alert notifies nobody. The alert still shows on the Alerts page. Spectate skips a disabled path. In the dashboard, the Alerting section of a monitor shows which paths its alerts follow.

Teams, members and roles

All data belongs to a team: monitors, hosts, alerts, incidents, status pages and the plan. A person can be a member of more than one team, with one role in each team.

See Teams and roles and Members.

Projects

A project groups monitors, hosts and domains, for example Production and Staging. A project can have its own escalation paths. Resources in the project follow those paths, unless a resource sets its own paths.

Every team has a default project. New monitors and hosts join it when you do not select another project. You cannot delete the default project. See Projects.

Regions

Spectate runs checks from four regions:

Each monitor has one primary region. All its checks, rechecks, response times and uptime come from that region. See Locations and checks.