Notification Channels

Notification channels define where alerts are sent. Yorker supports five channel types: Slack, email, webhook, PagerDuty, and ServiceNow. Channels are shared across your team and can be referenced by any alert rule or SLO.

Channel Types

Slack

Posts alert notifications to a Slack channel via an incoming webhook.

alertChannels:
  ops-slack:
    type: slack
    webhookUrl: "{{secrets.SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL}}"

To set up a Slack webhook, create an Incoming Webhook in your Slack workspace and use the generated URL.

Email

Sends alert notifications to one or more email addresses.

alertChannels:
  on-call-email:
    type: email
    addresses:
      - [email protected]
      - [email protected]

At least one address is required.

Webhook

Sends an HTTP request to any URL. Use this for Opsgenie, custom integrations, or any service that accepts webhooks. For PagerDuty and ServiceNow, prefer the dedicated channel types below: they speak the native APIs, dedupe incidents with each platform's own keying (so a recurring Yorker alert updates the existing PD/SNOW record instead of creating a new one), and follow each platform's lifecycle event semantics.

alertChannels:
  opsgenie:
    type: webhook
    url: "{{secrets.OPSGENIE_WEBHOOK_URL}}"
    method: POST
    headers:
      Authorization: "GenieKey {{secrets.OPSGENIE_KEY}}"

PagerDuty

Speaks the PagerDuty Events API v2 directly. See the PagerDuty integration guide for the full setup: routing key + region selection, plus how Yorker incident lifecycle events (opened, acknowledged, auto_resolved, closed, reopened) map to PagerDuty event actions.

alertChannels:
  pagerduty-oncall:
    type: pagerduty
    routingKey: "{{secrets.PAGERDUTY_ROUTING_KEY}}"
    serviceRegion: us  # or "eu" for events.eu.pagerduty.com

ServiceNow

Creates and updates ServiceNow incidents via the Table API. See the ServiceNow integration guide for the full setup: instance authentication, Yorker incident-event mapping to ServiceNow Table API actions, plus field and severity mappings on the resulting incident records.

alertChannels:
  servicenow-prod:
    type: servicenow
    instanceUrl: "https://acme.service-now.com"
    username: "{{secrets.SNOW_USER}}"
    password: "{{secrets.SNOW_PASSWORD}}"
    assignmentGroup: "Platform Oncall"  # optional

Create channels in the Web UI

1. Navigate to Settings > Notification Channels.
2. Click Create Channel.
3. Select the channel type (Slack, Email, or Webhook).
4. Fill in the required fields.
5. Click Save.

The Web UI currently supports Slack, Email, and Webhook channel types. PagerDuty and ServiceNow channels must be defined via YAML (see below) or the REST API. UI editor support for those channel types is planned for a future release.

Channels created in the UI and via the CLI are the same underlying resource. The CLI's yorker deploy detects and diffs against channels created through the UI.

Define channels in YAML

Add an alertChannels block at the top level of yorker.config.yaml:

alertChannels:
  ops-slack:
    type: slack
    webhookUrl: "{{secrets.SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL}}"

  on-call-email:
    type: email
    addresses:
      - [email protected]

  pagerduty-oncall:
    type: pagerduty
    routingKey: "{{secrets.PAGERDUTY_ROUTING_KEY}}"

  servicenow-prod:
    type: servicenow
    instanceUrl: "https://acme.service-now.com"
    username: "{{secrets.SNOW_USER}}"
    password: "{{secrets.SNOW_PASSWORD}}"

Reference channels in alerts

Use the @channel-name syntax to attach a channel to an alert rule:

monitors:
  - name: API Health
    type: http
    url: https://api.example.com/health
    alerts:
      - conditions:
          - type: consecutive_failures
            count: 3
        channels:
          - "@ops-slack"
          - "@on-call-email"

Reference channels in SLOs

SLOs can also reference channels for burn rate alerts:

slos:
  - name: API Availability
    monitor: API Health
    target: "99.9%"
    window: 30d
    channels:
      - "@ops-slack"

Deploy ordering

When you run yorker deploy, channels are created/updated before alerts and SLOs (phase 0), and deleted after all references are removed (phase Z). This ensures channels always exist when alerts or SLOs reference them.

Customize incident notification templates

Slack, email, and webhook channels support per-event template overrides that let you replace Yorker's default payload with your own Handlebars-rendered markup. The in-app editor at Settings > Notification Channels > Templates gives you:

• A Handlebars editor with channel-appropriate syntax highlighting (JSON for Slack/webhook, HTML for email)
• A live preview rendered against six canonical incident fixtures (single HTTP failure, multi-location burst, browser check, MCP, and more)
• A library of starters and curated examples you can apply with one click, plus a diff view against the currently saved template
• Send test: dispatches the current saved template to the real channel with the selected fixture (60-second cooldown per channel)

See the Incidents concepts page for the render context and fallback semantics. Per-channel examples and helper reference live on each integration page: Slack, Email, Webhook.

PagerDuty and ServiceNow template overrides are authored through the REST API only; UI editor support for those channel types is planned for a future release.

Manage channels via API

Channels can also be managed through the REST API. See the REST API reference for endpoints.