Alerts on Telegram, through your own bot.

Send a message to a chat or channel through your own Telegram bot. Because the bot is yours, delivery goes through an account you control rather than a shared integration.

Set up once, use anywhere. The connection belongs to the account, so every monitor and every flow can point at it without a second setup.
Test before you trust it. Send test fires a real message, so a bad URL or token is found now rather than during an outage.
Encrypted at rest. Tokens and credentials you enter are encrypted at rest.

Start free All features

01 · Using it well

What Telegram is good for.

Push to a phone without SMS costs

Telegram delivers to a phone without per-message charges, which makes it a cheaper alternative to SMS for many teams.

Your own bot

The bot belongs to you, so the delivery path is under your control rather than a shared third-party integration.

Chats or channels

Deliver to a private chat for one person or a channel the whole team can see, depending on what the alert is for.

Works well outside the office

Telegram is often already installed on the phones of people who would otherwise need a separate paging app.

02 · Controls

How often it fires.

The connection decides where an alert goes. These settings decide how often it goes there.

Once per incident

The default. The step fires once and resets on recovery, so a long outage does not turn into a wall of messages.

Or on every check

Switch the step to fire on every matching check when you want a continuous signal instead of a single alert.

Flap cooldown

Fifteen minutes by default, so a monitor bouncing down and up will not re-send inside that window.

Message placeholders

Write the message with placeholders such as flow, state, detail and duration so the alert carries context.

Behind a schedule gate

Put the step behind set hours and days if it is informational, and leave the critical path ungated.

Repeat until resolved

Add a Repeat alert block before the step to keep sending on an interval while the monitor stays down.

Questions

Common questions

How do I connect Telegram to Hesklo?

Create a bot with BotFather to get a bot token, add the bot to the chat or channel you want alerts in and obtain that chat ID, then add a Telegram connection in the monitor editor sidebar with both values. Send test confirms delivery.

Do I need my own Telegram bot?

Yes. Messages are sent through a bot you create, which means the credentials and the delivery path belong to you rather than to a shared integration.

Can I send to a channel rather than a direct chat?

Yes. Provide the chat ID of the channel and add the bot to it. Which one you choose depends on whether the alert is for one person or the whole team.

Is Telegram a good substitute for SMS?

For many teams, yes, since it reaches a phone without per-message costs. SMS and phone calls remain more reliable for waking someone, since they do not depend on data connectivity or notification settings.