Set up critical alerts

Understand how sources, rules, destinations and incidents fit together, then build your first alert with the guided setup.

In the sidebar, open Critical Alerts, then Dashboard. The page address is /critical-alerts. The guided setup is Critical Alerts, then Setup, then Guided Setup, at /critical-alerts/create.

Critical Alerts is how Nova gets a person on the phone when something important goes wrong: a walk-in freezer alarm, a boiler fault, a monitoring box that stops checking in. A device or outside system sends Nova a signal, Nova opens an incident, and Nova calls, texts, emails or notifies the right people until someone deals with it.

Before you start

• Your admin has to give your role permission to view critical alerts. Each piece below has its own manage permission, so you may see some pages and not others.
• Phone-call alerts need voice delivery turned on for your organization. The guided setup shows a Voice entitlement row under Progress so you can tell at a glance.

How the pieces fit

Every alert path is four things, in this order:

1. A source is where the signal comes in: a webhook address for a device or outside system, an email inbox, a text line, or an event inside Nova. See Add a source and send it a signal.
2. A rule looks at each signal from a source, decides whether it matters and how severe it is, and says who to tell. See Create a rule.
3. A destination is who gets told and how: a phone call, a text, an email, an in-app or push notification, or a webhook to another system. See Add a destination.
4. An incident is the record Nova opens when a rule matches. People acknowledge it, snooze it or resolve it. See Acknowledge, snooze and resolve an incident.

Four more pieces help:

• Templates hold the exact wording that is spoken or sent. See Write an alert template.
• Schedules say who is on call right now, so a destination can follow a rotation. See Create an on-call schedule.
• Suppressions mute alerts during planned maintenance. See Mute alerts during maintenance.
• Recipes are starting patterns that prefill all of the above. See Create a recipe.

Steps

The fastest way to a working alert is the guided setup.

1. Open Guided Setup under Setup.
2. Under 1. Recipe, press the recipe that matches what you are wiring in.
3. Under 2. Source, pick an existing source or press Create source. Copy the address Nova shows; it is shown once.
4. Under 3. Recipient routing, choose Direct recipient or On-call schedule, then pick or create the destination.
5. Under 4. Template and 5. Rule, pick or create each one.
6. Under 6. Test, press Trigger test signal and confirm the right person is contacted.
7. Publish the drafts you created. See Publish a draft or roll back to an earlier version.

Every step in detail: Create an alert with the guided setup.

What you see

The dashboard shows five counts: Recipes, Sources, Rules, Open Incidents, and Signals / 7d (signals seen in the last 7 days). The live lists sit right under Dashboard in the sidebar: Incidents, Signals, Failures and Analytics. Run Now and Audit are in the Setup group.

If something looks different

• Every count on the dashboard is zero: nothing is set up yet. Start with the guided setup.
• Open Incidents keeps climbing: someone needs to resolve them. Acknowledging does not close an incident unless the rule says so.
• An alert never rang anyone: check Failures for a delivery that failed, then see Retry a failed alert delivery.

Open the guided setup