Acknowledge incidents with one tap, right in Telegram

Setting it up

Telegram alerts need a plan from Starter upwards. On Free, use email or Discord. Setup is about a minute and does not involve creating a bot of your own.

• Open Integrations, choose Telegram and press Connect. This opens the Tenium bot with a one-time token.
• Press Start. The bot answers that the chat is connected and tells you the two commands it understands.
• Back in Tenium, reload the page and the contact shows as verified. Add it to a monitor, or to your default contacts.
• For a team, repeat the step from inside a group chat. The contact is tied to whichever chat the start message comes from, so connecting from the group makes it the group’s contact.

Anatomy of an alert

A down alert is one compact message: a status dot, the title, the monitor name, the reason (for example “HTTP 503” or “connection timed out”), the regions that confirmed it, and the client name if the monitor belongs to a client workspace. When we can identify a third-party provider behind the failure, such as a CDN, it is named. The last line offers two ways to take ownership: reply /ack, or tap the acknowledge link, plus a link to the incident page.

The recovery message says how long the site was down. Between the two, nothing else arrives: no “still down” reminders every five minutes. If you want a nudge when nobody has reacted, that is what alert escalation is for, on Pro.

The two commands, and a safety note

/ack acknowledges the most recent open incident for the account the chat is linked to and stops further escalation. /status lists the monitors that are currently down, or says that all are up. Those are the only commands, so you cannot create, pause or delete anything from Telegram.

Two things follow from how it works. First, /ack means “the latest open incident”, not “the one in the message above”, so with two things burning, use the acknowledge link in the specific message. Second, anyone in the linked chat can acknowledge. That is convenient in a team group and a reason not to link a large public channel. Every acknowledgement is recorded in the audit log with the chat it came from.

Groups per client or per team

Most agencies end up with two layers: a private group for the on-call team that receives everything, and optionally a group per important client that receives only that client’s monitors. Agency workspaces make the second easy because contacts can belong to a workspace, with the workspace defaults used first. Alerts include the client’s name, so even the shared team group shows whose site it is.

Reliability, and what to pair it with

Telegram is a free third-party service, and a delivery can fail if the bot is rate-limited or Telegram is having a bad hour. A failed send is retried, with up to three attempts 30 seconds apart, before it is logged as failed. For a site that matters, send the same alert to email as well, and on Pro add a second person as a later escalation step so a muted phone is not a single point of failure.

Quiet hours do not delay downtime alerts, which arrive immediately regardless of the hour; they only hold back non-critical notices such as certificate expiry warnings and slow-response alerts until the morning. Mute the chat in Telegram itself if you want silence, but keep in mind that nothing then tells you the muted channel was the only one.

How it compares with other chat channels

Slack and Teams are better when the alert should land in a work channel with threads and colleagues. Telegram is better when the people being alerted are individuals who carry their phone, and when a freelancer or a client contact does not have a shared workspace. The integrations page lists every channel and its plan.