Incoming alerts: what they are

Let Datadog, Grafana, Alertmanager, CloudWatch or your own scripts open incidents in UptimeWave.

Last reviewed November 11, 2026

An incoming alert monitor does not check anything itself. It has a secret address, and other tools send alerts to it. When a tool says "this is broken", we open an incident. When it says "recovered", we close it.

Why it is useful

  • One place for every incident, whether it came from a check or from another tool.
  • Your alert rules, teams, timeline and message history work the same way.
  • A response can act on the alert, for example block the address behind an attack. See Block addresses in Cloudflare.

Alerts are not always downtime

A monitor has a setting for whether its alerts count as downtime. By default they do not: the monitor shows Ongoing and Resolved, and your uptime figures are left alone. Turn it on for a source that really means "the service is down".

Set one up

  1. Create a monitor of type Incoming alerts.
  2. Choose the source: Datadog, Grafana, Alertmanager, CloudWatch, or Generic.
  3. Follow the steps shown on the monitor, which tell you exactly what to paste into the other tool.

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