New Pushover for Teams Feature: Inactivity Monitors

A new frequently requested feature is available today for Pushover for Teams subscribers and included free with your subscription: inactivity monitors.

Inactivity Monitors

Many Pushover users utilize our service for sending alerts from network monitoring systems such as Zabbix, Nagios, and PRTG. When a device or service is unreachable, a Pushover notification can alert operations staff of the problem with customizable delivery options.

But what happens when your network’s internet connection is down and alerts can’t reach us, or the monitoring system itself has failed?

Pushover’s new Inactivity Monitors act as a “heartbeat” mechanism where your monitoring device (or any device) pings our API every so often and when we haven’t received a ping in a configured amount of time, a Pushover notification is sent to your group.

Inactivity Monitors can also be setup for each server or device, avoiding the need to setup a network monitor at all. This is also helpful for networks or internal services that aren’t reachable by an external monitoring service such as Pingdom. Rather than having to monitor each device locally, each of your servers can just ping our API and we’ll notify you when they stop.

Creating a Monitor

Pushover for Teams administrators will now see an option to “Create a Monitor” on their team dashboard.

Teams can create as many monitors as needed, each with their own timeouts and alert settings. The main setting is the inactivity duration, which determines how long we’ll wait to receive a ping since the last one before sending an alert.

Alert Options

When our API has failed to receive a ping at the URL we provide in the configured amount of minutes, we’ll generate a notification to the group you choose with all of the options you’ve configured:

Once an alert is sent for an inactive device, we won’t alert for it again for future missed pings until it pings again.

Inactivity Monitors are available today for all Pushover for Teams subscribers. We hope you find this feature useful and we’ll be introducing additional monitor types in the future. We’d love to hear your feedback and feature suggestions.