Notifications and Alert Rules | Self-hosted error tracking

Why smart notifications matter

Error tracking without good notifications is just a fancy log file. You need to know when something breaks in production, but you also need to avoid drowning in noise. A single flaky endpoint or a known issue can generate hundreds of reports. If every one of them pings your team, people start ignoring the channel.

The goal is signal, not volume. You want to hear about new problems, spikes in known issues, or errors that keep coming back after a deploy. Everything else should be filterable or suppressible.

Telebugs was built with this reality in mind. Notifications are a core part of the product, not an afterthought or paid add-on.

Notification channels that actually work

You can send alerts through multiple channels at once. Pick what fits your team.

• Email: Classic, reliable, with backtraces and context included. Great for individuals or small teams.
• PWA push notifications: Install Telebugs on your phone like an app. Get alerts even when the dashboard is closed. Works on mobile and desktop.
• Slack and Discord: Team channels get rich messages with error details. Use modern block formatting for clean, actionable posts.
• Microsoft Teams: Native support for Teams notifications so enterprise teams stay in their primary chat tool.
• Custom webhooks: Send to any HTTP endpoint. Perfect for PagerDuty, OpsGenie, internal bots, or anything else that accepts webhooks.

You control which channels are active per project and per rule. No need to spam every channel for every error.

Rules that cut the noise

The real power comes from notification rules. Instead of sending everything, you define exactly when an alert should fire.

Common rule types

• New errors: Alert the first time a particular issue appears.
• Recurrences: Notify again if the same error comes back after being resolved or after a quiet period.
• Spikes: Detect sudden increases in frequency for a known issue.
• Every occurrence: For critical paths where you want to know about every single instance.
• Frequency / cooldown: Limit how often a rule can fire (e.g., at most once every 15 minutes) to avoid storms.

Rules can be scoped to specific projects, error patterns, or environments. You can also temporarily mute or snooze an error (1 hour, 4 hours, 8 hours, 1 day, or 3 days) directly from the UI when you know a fix is in progress.

How it feels in practice

A developer deploys a React app. A new error starts appearing from a bad API response in a specific component. The team gets one clean Slack message with the stack trace, context, and a direct link. No flood of 47 identical emails.

Later the same day the error rate jumps 10x after a marketing campaign. A spike rule fires and pings the on-call person via push notification on their phone.

A known flaky test error that the team has decided to live with for now? Mute it for 3 days while the fix is scheduled. Everyone stays focused.

The system stays out of the way until it has something useful to say.

When this approach makes sense

If your team is small to medium and values focus over exhaustive alerting, these controls are extremely effective. You get the channels most teams actually use (Slack/Discord + phone + email) without the complexity of full observability platforms.

Larger organizations with dedicated SRE teams and complex escalation policies may still want the full feature set of something like Sentry's alerting or dedicated incident tools. For most product teams shipping web and mobile apps, the combination of good grouping + flexible rules + multiple delivery channels is the sweet spot.

Everything is included with your one-time Telebugs purchase. No per-user notification tiers or extra fees for webhooks.

How this compares to self-hosted Sentry

Self-hosted Sentry has very powerful alerting, but it comes with significant operational cost. The notification system is part of a much larger, more complex stack.

Telebugs keeps notifications simple and reliable in the same lightweight single container as the rest of the product. Setup is straightforward through the UI or API. The focus is on the channels and rule types that solve alert fatigue for real teams rather than trying to replicate every possible enterprise workflow.

You still get the Sentry SDK compatibility on the client side, so your existing instrumentation continues to work while the server-side experience becomes lighter and more targeted.

Frequently asked questions

Can I send the same error to multiple channels?

Yes. You can enable any combination of email, push, Slack, Discord, Teams, and webhooks for the same rule or project. Many teams use Slack for the room and push for the person on call.

How do I avoid alert fatigue on known issues?

Use muting and snoozing for temporary suppression, or create a rule that only fires on new errors or spikes. You can also use custom grouping or ignore patterns in the SDK for issues you never want to see again.

Do push notifications require the dashboard open?

No. The PWA can be installed on your phone or desktop and will deliver notifications even when the browser tab is closed (as long as the device has network access and notifications are allowed for the site).

Can I use webhooks for custom integrations?

Absolutely. Any service that accepts incoming webhooks (or a simple HTTP POST) can receive Telebugs notifications. You control the payload format and can include the full error details.

Are there limits on how many notifications I can send?

There are no per-notification or per-event fees. Your only practical limits are the rate limits of the destination services (Slack, email providers, etc.) and your own infrastructure. Rules with cooldowns help you stay well within reasonable volumes.

Ready to get notified without the noise?

Read the Telebugs manual for full notification and rule configuration details, or get Telebugs and set up the channels your team actually uses.