When one of your monitors generates an error, you can send alerts to all kinds of third party systems including Slack and PagerDuty, to your phone, or via good old trusty email. If you’re using the email channel as a way to process incoming alert messages, you may want to automate that using email rules or some other form of automated processing.
In order set up effective processing rules, it can be useful to look for certain words or phrases inside the email content. While each alert email coming from Uptrends always starts with the same content (citing the monitor name, time and date of the alert, and so on) you can include a fixed custom text in an alert email by specifying the Message field in the escalation level of an alert definition.
This custom text is now the key to more powerful and flexible alert email content! Inside your custom text, you can now include references to dynamically generated data that is relevant to the alert or the failing monitor (this data is expressed using system variables) and to custom fields you can specify. Custom fields are text values that you can specify for each specific monitor. For example, you can use custom fields to keep track of the data center where each site is hosted, which rack(s) in that data center, which checklist should be used to resolve issues, or anything else that is specific for each monitor. You can now output that additional data as part of your alerting, simply by making a reference to a custom field inside your custom alert text. Use the {{@CustomField()}} notation to create these references. For more information about system variables and custom fields, please read the documentation for setting up custom integrations, which already included these options.