Set Up Slack Alerts for Production Errors

Getting a Slack ping when something breaks in production is one of the highest-value things you can set up. This tutorial walks through creating a LogFlow alert that fires when error rate exceeds 5% over a 5-minute window.

Prerequisites

• Logs flowing into LogFlow (see the Quick Start guide)
• A Slack workspace where you can create a webhook

Step 1 — Create a Slack incoming webhook

1. Go to api.slack.com/apps and click Create New App → From scratch
2. Name it "LogFlow Alerts", pick your workspace
3. In the left sidebar, click Incoming Webhooks → toggle it On
4. Click Add New Webhook to Workspace → select the #alerts channel (or create one)
5. Copy the webhook URL — it looks like https://hooks.slack.com/services/T.../B.../xxx

Step 2 — Create the alert in LogFlow

Open LogFlow → Alerts and click New Alert.

Fill in the form:

Condition

• Type: Error rate above
• Threshold: 5 (percent)
• Window: 5 minutes

Channel

• Type: Slack
• Webhook URL: paste your Slack webhook URL from Step 1

Settings

• Name: High error rate
• Cooldown: 30 minutes (prevents repeated pings during an ongoing incident)

Click Create Alert.

Step 3 — Test it

The fastest way to test: send a few error logs via the CLI or the HTTP API, then check your Slack channel.

# Send a test error via HTTP API
curl -X POST https://api.getlogflow.com/v1/logs \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer lf_your_key" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"level":"error","message":"Payment failed","service":"api"}'

Alternatively, trigger errors in your application and watch for the Slack message.

What the Slack message looks like

When the alert fires, LogFlow posts a message to your channel:

🚨 Alert: High error rate Error rate is 8.3% (threshold: 5%) in the last 5 minutes. Service: api · Project: My App View logs →

Other alert types worth setting up

While you're here, consider adding these:

Alert type	When to use
Keyword match	Fire when a specific string appears ("database connection failed")
Log count above	Fire when request volume spikes unexpectedly
Level spike	Fire when fatal logs appear (any count)
Anomaly detection	Automatic — fires when LogFlow detects unusual patterns

All support the same channels: Slack, Telegram, email, Discord, or any webhook.

FAQ

What is the cooldown period? After an alert fires, LogFlow waits for the cooldown period before firing again — even if the condition is still true. This prevents your Slack channel from being spammed during a long outage. 30 minutes is a good default.

Can I alert on a specific service only? Currently alerts apply to your whole project. Filter in the Logs Explorer and create separate projects per critical service if you need per-service alerting.

What if I want to alert on Telegram instead? The setup is identical — choose Telegram as the channel type and provide your bot token and chat ID. See Alerts documentation for all channel types.