Sentinel now sends alerts to Telegram. Add a chat from your team's Integrations page, open the link it gives you, tap Start, and the Sentinel bot is connected. That's the whole setup. No bot to create, no token to paste, no chat ID to look up.

It's free on every plan, including the free one.

Why Telegram

A lot of the people who run websites for a living don't live in Slack. Freelancers, small agencies, solo founders, and most of the world outside North America talk in Telegram. It's on the phone, it's fast, and it doesn't need a workspace or a seat. When a client's site goes down at 11pm, a Telegram message is the thing that actually gets read.

Until now those people had email, or Discord if they happened to use it. Now the alert can land where they already are.

What you get

Every alert Sentinel sends to Slack, it now sends to Telegram in the same words: a site going down and coming back, a keyword or JSON check failing, a port that stopped answering, a heartbeat that went quiet, a certificate about to expire, a domain about to lapse, a DNS record that changed, a page that got slow. Each message names the monitor, says which region caught it and why, and links to the monitor and the incident in Sentinel.

Each connected chat picks its own severities. An ops group can take everything. A client's channel can get outages and recoveries and nothing else. And every monitor's own notification routing has a Telegram row, so a staging site can stay out of Telegram entirely.

How it connects

Sentinel runs one bot for everyone, called @SentinelByRootstuffBot. You never touch BotFather.

For direct messages: add a chat in Sentinel, give it a name, open the link, tap Start. The row flips to connected within a few seconds.

For a group or channel: add the bot to it, then send the one-line connect command shown on the row. The bot confirms in the chat.

If someone later removes the bot from a group, Telegram tells Sentinel and the chat pauses itself. You'll see it on the Integrations page next to when each chat last received a message. Add the bot back, press Test, and it resumes. Nothing fails silently.

Groups, channels, or your phone

Three ways people are already using it:

  • A team group where everyone sees every alert, with the incident link one tap away
  • An announcements channel for a client, where only outages and recoveries appear and the bot posts as an administrator
  • Direct messages to one phone, for the person who wants to know first

Any team can connect several chats, each with its own settings.

What's next

The channel does the same job Slack does today: alerts in, links out. The obvious next step is doing things from the chat, like acknowledging an incident or asking for a status summary without opening the dashboard. If that would matter to you, tell me.

In the meantime, connect a chat and let the next outage find you where you already are.