How-to
Pausing Alert Emails
Temporarily suppress alert emails during planned maintenance or a noisy incident — webhooks keep firing.
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When to pause
Alert emails can become noise when:
- You're in the middle of an incident you already know about and don't need 50 reminder emails
- You're running scheduled maintenance that will trip detectors
- A detector is in warmup mode producing false positives while you tune thresholds
How to pause
Go to Settings → Alert Emails card. Pick a duration:
- 1 hour — typical incident window
- 4 hours — a long release or migration
- 24 hours — scheduled multi-hour maintenance
- Until I resume — indefinite; you'll resume manually
A persistent banner appears across every page while paused, with a Resume button so you can cancel the pause from anywhere.
What keeps running while paused
- Detectors — they continue evaluating and opening / updating / resolving alerts in the database
- Webhooks — still fire (so on-call integrations like PagerDuty / Slack / Opsgenie keep working)
- Dashboard — still shows all open alerts
- Audit log — every alert that would have emailed during the pause is logged as
notify_suppressedwith the intended recipients preserved
What doesn't
- Alert emails to your tenant's notification address or per-rule email overrides
This is deliberately email-only. Webhooks are typically where real on-call escalation lives, so pausing them would be dangerous.
Auto-resume
If you picked a duration, the pause auto-ends when the deadline passes — no action needed. If you picked "Until I resume", you have to click Resume manually.
Audit trail
Every suppressed alert appears in the alert's event timeline as a notify_suppressed event with the paused_until timestamp and the intended recipient count. Useful for incident postmortems — shows exactly which notifications the pause swallowed.