Smarter Monitor Wizard, Notification Routes & Connected Apps

Monitor Wizard

The monitor creation experience got a major upgrade. The new wizard walks you through building monitors with real-time feedback at every step.

• Pongo2 (Jinja2-like) templating for issue description and summary, use dynamic variables like {{ labels.namespace }} or{{ values }} to craft meaningful, context rich notifications including if/else conditions
• Autocomplete for variables- no more guessing or checking docs. Available variables surface inline as you type {{
• Notification route preview- before saving, see exactly which notification routes would match this monitor based on your current configuration
• End to end testing- simulate an issue for your monitor to verify that the right notification routes fire and the right connected apps receive the alert. Catch misconfigurations before they cost you an incident
• Notification delivery control- decide per monitor whether issue notifications should be routed through notification routes, sent directly to a connected app, or should not send out notifications entirely

Notification Routes

Notification Routes replace the old workflow system with a streamlined, purpose built UI for routing alert notifications to their destinations.

Instead of building multi step workflows in YAML with action filters and annotation based matching, define routes simply:

1. Match monitors using a gcQL query
2. Preview which monitors are matching to align expectations
3. Select the statuses you care about (Alerting, Resolved)
4. Choose where to receive the notifications using your connected apps

That's it!

Connected Apps

Connected Apps are the new home for your notification destinations. We've expanded provider support and added reliability features:

• New providers- Rootly and incident.io join the existing lineup of Slack, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, and Generic Webhooks
• Connection testing- validate that your app configuration is correct directly from the UI. No more "send a test alert and hope", get instant feedback on whether your integration is properly configured

Terraform Support

Both Notification Routes and Connected Apps are fully manageable via Terraform (Monitors being already supported). Define your routing rules and integrations as code, version them, and apply them across environments, just like the rest of your groundcover configuration.

Explore & Dashboard Support

Monitor issues are now available as a data source in Data Explorer and Dashboards. Query, filter, and visualize your issues alongside logs, traces, and metrics. Build dashboards that correlate issue trends with deployments and surface noisy monitors.

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What Changed: Old vs. New

Capability Before Now Monitor creation Basic form with static text fields Wizard with Pongo2 (Jinja2) templating and variable autocomplete Notification preview None. Trial and error on real notifications after saving Preview matching notification routes before saving Notification testing None. Trial and error on real notifications after saving Simulate an issue to verify routes and connected apps fire correctly Notification delivery control All or nothing via workflow attachment Per-monitor choice: notification routes, direct to connected app, or silent

Workflows vs. Notification Routes

Capability Workflows Notification Routes Alert routing Written in YAML with multi-step actions, annotation-based monitor matching, and filters A dedicated UI, gcQL-based matching, simple status and connected app choice Monitor to route association Annotation keys on monitors matched to workflow names Matching based on any metadata present on the issue, including monitor metadata like severity, dynamic group-by labels, and custom labels Conditional filtering Go-template expressions in action conditions, for example {{ alert.labels.namespace }} == "prod" Built into the route query using standard gcQL syntax Infrastructure as Code No support Full Terraform support

Notification Integrations vs. Connected Apps

Capability Notification Integrations Connected Apps Notification destinations Slack, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, webhooks All previous providers + Rootly, incident.io Integration validation None. Trial and error on real notifications after saving Built-in connection testing from the UI Infrastructure as Code No support Full Terraform support