Sentinel's official Slack app is now listed on the Slack Marketplace. If your team lives in Slack, your uptime alerts can now live there too, installed in a few clicks through Slack's own directory.

What the app does

The idea is simple: when something happens to a site you monitor, the alert lands in the channel where your team will actually see it.

  • A monitor goes down: the channel gets the alert with the reason and the region that detected it
  • It recovers: the channel gets the recovery, so nobody keeps debugging a fire that's already out
  • Server errors appear on an otherwise healthy page, a heartbeat goes silent, an SSL certificate is about to expire: those land in the channel too

Each install is scoped to a single channel, and you can install to as many channels as you like. A client-facing channel can receive only critical alerts while your internal ops channel gets everything, because each connection has its own severity filter.

Why the Marketplace listing matters

The app itself has been available for a while through the Integrations page, and existing installs keep working exactly as before. The Marketplace listing adds two things.

First, discovery: you can now find Sentinel by searching the app directory inside Slack, the same place you'd find any other tool your team uses.

Second, review: Marketplace apps go through Slack's approval process, which checks security practices, OAuth scopes, and TLS configuration before listing. Sentinel requests exactly one capability, posting to the channel you choose. It can't read your messages, it can't see other channels, and it can't act on your workspace. That's the entire permission surface, and it's now been vetted by Slack as well as by me.

How to install it

From Slack: find Sentinel in the Marketplace and add it to your workspace.

From Sentinel: go to your team's Integrations page, click Add to Slack, and pick a channel. Either path takes about thirty seconds.

Slack alerts are available on every paid plan. If you're already using a pasted webhook URL from before the official app existed, that still works and will keep working; the app is just the nicer way to do the same thing, with per-channel installs and severity filtering handled for you.

What's next

The current app is deliberately minimal: alerts in, nothing else. There's an obvious next tier, things like acknowledging an incident from Slack or asking for a status summary without leaving the channel, and I'd like to build it when enough people want it. If that's you, tell me.

In the meantime: install the app, point it at your alerts channel, and let your monitoring meet your team where it already works.