# Alerts and notifications

A tracker nobody reads is a log file with a nicer font. Notifications are set per application, under its settings.

## Where alerts can go

* **Email**, to the people on the application.
* **Slack**, **Discord** and **Microsoft Teams**, through an incoming webhook from the workspace or server you want the message in.
* **A webhook of your own**, posted as JSON, for a pager or a bot.
* **The mobile apps**, as a push the moment an issue is new.

## What is worth being told about

A new issue is the one that matters: something is happening that was not happening before. An occurrence of an issue you have already seen is usually not, and a busy application will teach you to ignore the channel if it sends one of those every minute.

## Turning it down

Two controls, and they answer different questions.

**Mute an application** when the noise is expected and temporary: a migration, a known outage, a load test. It is a maintenance window, and it turns itself back on.

**Snooze an issue** when you have seen it, you are not fixing it today, and you would like it to stop telling you. It comes back when the snooze ends, or when it happens again after a quiet period, so it cannot be forgotten by accident.

## Quieting the source instead

If something reports far more often than it is worth hearing about, the fix is usually in the client rather than in the notification settings: `except` for an exception class that is never interesting, `sleep` for one that is interesting once an hour rather than once a second, and `sample_rate` for queue jobs. See [capturing exceptions](/docs/issues/exceptions).