Pausing Alert Emails

When to pause

Alert notifications can become noise when:

• You're in the middle of an incident you already know about and don't need 50 reminder emails
• You're running scheduled maintenance that will trip detectors
• A detector is in warmup mode producing false positives while you tune thresholds

How to pause

Go to Settings → Alert Emails card. Pick a duration:

• 1 hour — typical incident window
• 4 hours — a long release or migration
• 24 hours — scheduled multi-hour maintenance
• Until I resume — indefinite; you'll resume manually

A persistent banner appears across every page while paused, with a Resume button so you can cancel the pause from anywhere.

What keeps running while paused

• Detectors — they continue evaluating and opening / updating / resolving alerts
• Webhooks — still fire (so on-call integrations like PagerDuty / Opsgenie keep working)
• Dashboard — still shows all open alerts
• Audit log — every alert that would have notified during the pause is logged as notify_suppressed with the intended recipients preserved

What doesn't

• Alert emails to your tenant's notification address or per-rule email overrides
• Microsoft Teams and Slack messages — these follow the same semantics as email, so a pause quiets them too

Plain webhooks are deliberately never paused. They are typically where real on-call escalation lives, so pausing them would be dangerous.

Auto-resume

If you picked a duration, the pause auto-ends when the deadline passes — no action needed. If you picked "Until I resume", you have to click Resume manually.

Audit trail

Every suppressed alert appears in the alert's event timeline as a notify_suppressed event with the paused_until timestamp and the intended recipient count. Useful for incident postmortems — shows exactly which notifications the pause swallowed.

Pause, or mute?

Pausing is all-or-nothing across the whole tenant. If you only want to quieten one noisy detector, one alert, or one channel while you tune, mute it instead: detection and every other alert carry on. See Muting specific alerts.