Tag notifications

At Oh Dear, we’re always looking for ways to make web monitoring easier and more efficient for our users. That’s why we’re excited to introduce Tag Notifications, a new feature that expands our notification options beyond site and team-level notifications.

Why?

For our larger customers using tags is an effective way to identify and manage multiple clients, projects, or environments. However, managing notifications by site or team can be too broad or too granular.

For example, some sites might be missed when creating/updating notification channels for a particular department or client meaning some sites might be notifying an out-of-date recipient.

With Tag Notifications you can now define notifications channels to a tag, ensuring new sites or updates to notification configurations are not missed. Your notifications will always be up-to-date.

How It Works

Setting up Tag Notifications is simple:

1. Click 'Manage Tags' from the main user-menu.
2. You should see all tags defined for your team along with a summary showing the number of sites and notification channels associated with each tag.
3. Click on the 'Notifications' link to define the notification settings for each tag. You can specify the channels, recipients, and types of alerts for that tag just like you would for a site or team notification.

Now when a site is tagged it automatically inherits the tag’s notification settings so nothing gets missed :)

Tag groups

You can also create 'tag groups'. Tag groups are perfect for larger team - apply notification settings to multiple related tags at once. Tag group notifications are applied when a site has all of the tags in the group, for example:

Label: 'Client production sites' Tags: client, production

Only sites with both the client and production tags will receive the configured notifications.

Wildcards

Oh Dear also supports wildcard matching for tag groups. This is particularly useful when you have a naming convention for your tags and want to create rules that apply to a range of tags.

For example:

• A wildcard tag region-* would match tags like region-eu, region-us, etc.
• *-production would match tags like client1-production, project2-production, etc.

To use a wildcard:

1. When setting up a tag notification, enter your wildcard pattern (e.g., production*) in the tag selection field.
2. Oh Dear will interpret this as a wildcard and match it against your existing tags.

Tag notifications provide a powerful way to organize and manage your alerts, especially when dealing with a large number of sites with different requirements. By effectively using tags, tag groups, and wildcards, you can create a notification system that's both flexible and precise.

Examples

You can a arrange your tags in any way that suits your team's workflow. Here are some examples of how you might structure your tags, groups and notifications:

• Site 1: production region-eu client spatie app
• Site 2: production region-us client laravel app
• Site 3: staging region-us internal marketing project-a
• Site 4: staging region-us internal app project-a
• Site 5: staging region-eu internal app project-a

Client production: production client

Defines all 'client production' sites to send alerts to a high-priority internal Slack channel, email the account manager and the customer point of contact. This ensures your team responds quickly to any critical issues.

Client non-prod: development client

Set all 'non-prod client' sites to send alerts to an internal developer Slack channel only.

Marketing projects: internal production marketing project-*

Delivers all marketing projects to your marketing group email.

Internal important: internal app production

Send a PagerDuty message to your SRE team for internal production services and an SMS to your US-based on-call team.

API

We have added new API routes to manage tag notifications via the Oh Dear API.

Keep notifications up-to-date

Tag Notifications provide a more flexible and efficient way to handle alerts, especially for teams managing multiple sites across various clients or environments. By defining notifications at the tag level, you save time, reduce the risk of missed alerts, and ensure the right people are always informed.

Ready to get started with Tag Notifications? Head over to the 'Manage Tags' section of your team settings to start.

If you have any questions or issues feel free to reach out to our support team.