Alerts overview

Get notified when backups succeed or fail.

DBdock can send notifications when a backup completes (success or failure). Alerts work for both CLI backups and programmatic backups — the system reads from the same alerts config in either mode.

Channels

Email

SMTP via Gmail, SendGrid, AWS SES, Mailgun, or any provider.

Slack

Incoming webhooks — 2-minute setup.

Custom webhooks

Any HTTP endpoint — Discord, WhatsApp, your own service.

Scheduling

Run backups on a cron schedule.

When alerts fire

Every completed backup triggers an alert, whether it succeeded or failed.

On success

Alert includes:

• Backup ID
• Database name
• Size (original and compressed)
• Duration
• Storage location
• Encryption status

On failure

Alert includes:

• Error message
• Database details
• Timestamp
• Troubleshooting tip (based on the error)

Configuration

All alerts are configured in dbdock.config.json:

{
  "alerts": {
    "email": {
      "enabled": true,
      "smtp": { "host": "...", "port": 587, "secure": false },
      "from": "[e-mail]",
      "to": ["[e-mail]"]
    },
    "slack": {
      "enabled": true,
      "webhookUrl": "https://hooks.slack.com/services/..."
    }
  }
}

Secrets (SMTP password, Slack webhook URL) go in .env:

DBDOCK_SMTP_USER=your-smtp-user
DBDOCK_SMTP_PASS=your-smtp-password
DBDOCK_SLACK_WEBHOOK=https://hooks.slack.com/services/...

Testing alerts

npx dbdock test

Sends a test notification to each enabled channel without creating a backup.

Delivery behavior

Alerts are sent asynchronously — they never block backup completion. If an alert delivery fails, the backup still succeeds and the failure is logged.

Best practices

• Route failures to an on-call channel. Successes are nice-to-have; failures need eyes on them fast.
• Don’t wire backups into a noisy channel. A 100-person #general gets ignored.
• Use email for batch reports, Slack for real-time. Set email for weekly summaries, Slack for immediate failures.
• Test after setup. Run dbdock test to confirm delivery before trusting the alerts.

See also

Email setup

Configure SMTP.

Slack setup

2-minute webhook setup.