When a monitor detects a problem, you usually don't want to be paged for a one-second blip — but you do want to know quickly about a real outage. Uptimia gives you a few timing controls to strike that balance, and lets you combine notification channels so the right people hear about an incident at the right time. This article explains how alert timing works and how to build a simple escalation flow.
Alert Delay: Suppressing Transient Blips
The Alert delay setting controls how long a monitor must stay down before Uptimia sends a down alert. The default is 5 minutes (300 seconds).
This delay is what protects you from noise. A momentary network hiccup or a single failed check that recovers before the delay elapses won't trigger an alert. Only a problem that persists past your configured threshold sends a notification.
You can adjust the alert delay per monitor using the Alert delay slider on the monitor's Main tab, in the Notification settings section:
- Lower the delay for critical services where you want to know about an outage as fast as possible.
- Raise the delay for endpoints that are known to be occasionally flaky, to cut down on false alarms.
Recovery Notifications
The recovery toggle controls whether Uptimia sends an "up" notification when a monitor recovers. In the Notification settings section on the monitor's Main tab it appears as the "Notify when up" toggle. It's on by default, so by default you get both the down alert and the all-clear.
If your team prefers to be told only when something breaks, turn this toggle off. Leave it on if you rely on the recovery message to confirm an incident is resolved.
Alerting Days & Hours
Uptimia lets you suppress alerts during configured days and hours so a non-urgent alert doesn't wake anyone at 3 a.m. These settings are account-wide (they apply to your alert contacts, not to an individual monitor) and live on the Contacts page in two cards:
- Alerting Days — select the days on which you do not want to receive alerts.
- Alerting Hours — when enabled, the time window during which alerting is allowed.
Outside the permitted days and hours, alerts are suppressed. Because these are account-level settings rather than per-monitor ones, plan them around your overall on-call coverage: for true 24/7 coverage, leave Alerting Days and Alerting Hours fully open so alerts always come through.
Combining Channels for Escalation
Each contact is a single notification channel. Uptimia's built-in channels are email and SMS, and any integration you've set up — such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty, Discord, Telegram, Twilio, WhatsApp, or a webhook — becomes available as a contact channel too. Your account email must be verified before Uptimia will send any alert; once that is done, email and integration contacts (Slack, PagerDuty, webhook, etc.) are active the moment you add them, and SMS contacts are active immediately too (the Verify button on an SMS contact is optional and not a delivery prerequisite). You assign contacts to a monitor from the Alerting section on that monitor's Main tab using the contact multi-selector. The screenshot below shows the monitor's Main settings tab, where these controls live:
You can build a layered notification setup by assigning multiple contacts to the same monitor. For example, you might attach a Slack contact so your team sees the alert in chat first, plus a PagerDuty or SMS contact so an on-call engineer is paged directly. All assigned contacts are notified when the monitor's alert delay is exceeded.
What Repeated Alerting Does — and Doesn't — Do
It's important to be clear about how Uptimia handles a site that stays down. Uptimia sends a down alert once the alert delay is exceeded, and a recovery alert when the monitor comes back up (if recovery notifications are on). The settings described above govern when the initial alert fires and when alerts are suppressed — they are not a re-notification interval or a multi-tier escalation timer.
If your workflow needs repeated paging or tiered escalation while an incident is open, route alerts to a tool built for that — for example, a PagerDuty contact, where you can configure PagerDuty's own escalation policies and reminders. For setup or questions about your alerting configuration, reach out to support.
Related Articles
- Notifications & Alerting Overview — Learn how Uptimia alerts you across email, SMS, and integrations
- SMS Alerts: Setup, Verification, Credits & Coverage — Set up SMS (text message) alert contacts in Uptimia: adding