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Alert channels decide where NightOwl tells you something needs attention. They’re configured per app in Settings → Alert Channels, and every enabled channel fires for the same set of triggers — so you can mix a noisy Slack firehose with a quiet email summary without re-wiring your issue workflow.

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What fires an alert

Alerts are issue-state-driven, not occurrence-driven:
  • A new issue opens (first time the fingerprint is seen).
  • A resolved issue reoccurs (same fingerprint, new occurrence after the resolve timestamp).
  • A performance issue opens because a route crossed its p95 threshold.
Individual exceptions within an already-open issue do not re-alert. This keeps incident storms from flooding every channel.

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The four channel types

Email (BYOD SMTP)

Delivered through your own SMTP credentials — SendGrid, Postmark, AWS SES, Mailgun, or a self-hosted MTA. Credentials are encrypted at rest with Laravel’s Crypt facade.

Slack

Incoming webhook URL from a Slack app. Rich message formatting with issue title, environment, stack-trace excerpt, and a direct link back to the dashboard.

Discord

Channel webhook URL from Discord’s Integrations settings. Same rich embed as Slack, adapted to Discord’s format.

Webhook

Arbitrary HTTPS endpoint. JSON payload, optional HMAC-SHA256 signature in the X-NightOwl-Signature header for verification.
You can configure any number of channels per app, and any mix of types. Each channel has an independent enabled/disabled toggle.

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Email

Email is BYOD — bring your own deliverability. NightOwl never sends from a shared pool, which means alerts land in your team’s inbox with your domain and your reputation. Required fields: SMTP host, port, username, password, encryption (TLS/SSL/none), from address, from name. The password is encrypted in the database via Crypt and decrypted only in-memory when dispatching. Recipients are specified as a comma-separated list in the channel config. For team-wide alerts, use a distribution list (engineering@…) rather than listing individuals.

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Slack

  1. In Slack, create an app at api.slack.com/apps → Incoming Webhooks → Add New Webhook to Workspace.
  2. Copy the webhook URL (starts with https://hooks.slack.com/services/…).
  3. Paste into the Slack channel config in the NightOwl dashboard.
The alert includes issue title, environment badge, first five app-frame stack lines, and a View in NightOwl button linking to the issue detail page.

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Discord

  1. In Discord, open Server Settings → Integrations → Webhooks → New Webhook, pick the destination channel, and copy the URL.
  2. Paste into the Discord channel config.
Discord supports embeds, so the alert renders with a colored side bar (red for exceptions, amber for performance), title, and fields for environment, count, and first-seen.

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Webhook

For anything more custom — routing to PagerDuty, OpsGenie, a bespoke router, or your own incident bot — use a webhook channel. The payload shape: 
{
  "event": "issue.opened",
  "issue": {
    "id": 4812,
    "type": "exception",
    "title": "TypeError: Cannot read properties of null",
    "environment": "production",
    "priority": "high",
    "url": "https://usenightowl.com/dashboard/abc123/issues/4812"
  },
  "app": { "id": "abc123", "name": "shop-api" },
  "occurrence": { "count_24h": 18, "first_seen": "2026-04-14T09:12:33Z" }
}
If you set a signing secret on the channel, NightOwl signs each request with HMAC-SHA256 over the raw body: 
X-NightOwl-Signature: sha256=<hex-digest>
Verify by recomputing the digest with your secret and the raw body, then comparing with hash_equals. Reject any request whose signature doesn’t match — this prevents forged alerts from reaching your downstream system.

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Testing a channel

Every channel has a Send test button that dispatches a synthetic issue.opened alert immediately. Use it after setup and after any credential rotation. The test uses the exact same dispatch path as real alerts, so a successful test guarantees real alerts will reach the same destination. If a test fails, the dashboard shows the specific error (SMTP auth failure, 4xx response from a webhook, invalid Slack URL) rather than a generic message.

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Toggling and disabling

Channels can be disabled without deleting. A disabled channel is skipped by the dispatcher but preserves its config and history — useful for silencing a channel during maintenance without losing the webhook URL or SMTP credentials.

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Under the hood

Alert dispatch goes through the ChannelDispatcherFactory on the backend, which resolves one of four implementations (EmailDispatcher, SlackDispatcher, DiscordDispatcher, WebhookDispatcher). The nightowl:notify-issues artisan command runs on a schedule, fans out to every enabled channel per app, and tolerates individual channel failures — one broken webhook never blocks Slack from firing.