Can I test my alerting?

You can send test messages to see that you're able to receive email, webhook and SMS alerts (these are not taken from your SMS credits).

You can test your webhooks by editing a check, scroll to the bottom and click Test beside one of the webhooks or click test from under Integrations > Webhooks.

This is how to test email and SMS alert messages:

1. Navigate to Users and teams > Users
2. Click on the User you want to test alerting for
3. Click the Test Alert Settings button near the bottom of the page

To test all types of alerts you can simulate a down event by either:

1. Edit one of your checks that is currently up, shown by an arrow pointing up and the color green
2. Set the test interval to 1 minute, so that you do not have to wait for too long for it to go down
3. Set the alerting to what you want to test
4. Change the URL to something you know will not work, for example: example.com/non-existing-file.html
5. Save the settings by clicking Modify check
6. Wait for alerts to get through to you

or:

1. Set up a new check for a URL that you know works and let it run for a while
2. Set the test interval to 1 minute, so that you do not have to wait for too long for it to go down
3. Set the alerting to what you want to test
4. Change the URL to something you know will not work, for example: example.com/non-existing-file.html
5. Save the settings by clicking Modify check
6. Wait for alerts to get through to you

A thing to keep in mind here is that the two methods to test above will draw SMS credits if you've set up those types of alerts as it would simulate an actual outage, taking down a service will also of course affect it's uptime reports.