Notifications — bRRAIn Docs

Routing notifications across channels, configuring escalation rules, and managing on-call rotations.

Notifications

The Notifier sends operational signals from bRRAIn to where your team will see them — your phone, your inbox, your Slack channel, your PagerDuty rotation. The Notifications page in the Console is where you decide who gets what, where, and when.

What fires a notification

bRRAIn fires notifications for:

  • Pod lifecycle events (provisioned, restarted, upgraded, failed).
  • Extension lifecycle events (installed, updated, failed, crashed).
  • Quota and billing thresholds (storage warning, monthly spend warning, plan limit reached).
  • Audit-significant actions (new Sovereign promoted, MFA bypass requested, master key rotated).
  • Approval queue entries (an action is awaiting human approval).
  • User-defined alerts (custom rules you create — see below).
  • Extension-fired notifications (an installed extension can fire into the Notifier).

Each notification has a severity — info, warning, error, critical.

Channels

Out of the box you can route notifications to:

| Channel | Notes | |---|---| | Console bell | Always on; shows in the top-right of every Console page. | | Email | Goes to the recipient's confirmed email. | | In-app inbox | Appears in app.brrain.io notifications. | | Slack | Requires Slack integration. | | Microsoft Teams | Requires Teams integration. | | Discord | Requires Discord integration. | | PagerDuty | Requires PagerDuty integration. | | Webhook | Generic HTTP POST to any URL you choose. | | SMS | Available on Enterprise tier; uses Twilio integration. | | Phone call | Available on Enterprise tier; voice via Twilio. |

You can route the same notification to multiple channels — common pattern is "warning to Slack, critical to PagerDuty + SMS."

Routing rules

A routing rule says: when a notification matches a filter, send it to one or more channels.

Filters can be:

  • By type — pod lifecycle, billing, audit, etc.
  • By severity — minimum severity that triggers this rule.
  • By extension — only notifications from a specific extension.
  • By time — quiet hours during which info-level notifications are suppressed (configurable per channel).

Rules are evaluated top-to-bottom. The first matching rule routes the notification. A catch-all rule at the bottom is recommended.

On-call rotations

For PagerDuty-style on-call (without requiring PagerDuty), the Notifier has its own rotation engine.

Define a rotation:

  • Pick a name (e.g., "Engineering on-call").
  • Add members.
  • Choose the rotation cadence (hourly, daily, weekly, custom).
  • Set the start time and time zone.
  • Optionally configure overrides (vacation, swap requests).

Then in your routing rule, target the rotation. Whoever is on-call at the moment the notification fires gets it via their preferred channel.

Escalation

If the first recipient doesn't acknowledge a critical notification within a configured window, the Notifier escalates:

  • Re-fires to the same channel.
  • Sends to a secondary channel.
  • Pages the next person in the rotation.
  • Optionally cascades up the chain of command.

Acknowledgments come from clicking the notification, replying to the email, reacting to the Slack message, or hitting the API.

Per-user preferences

Each member can set their own preferences from app.brrain.io/settings/notifications:

  • Preferred channel for direct mentions.
  • Quiet hours.
  • Frequency cap (e.g., bundle into a daily digest if more than 10/hour).
  • Channel-specific opt-outs (e.g., never SMS me).

User preferences override organization routing for direct-mention notifications. Operational alerts (pod crashed, billing failed) still go through the routing rules regardless.

Custom alerts

Define your own alert rules under Notifications → Custom alerts. An alert is a saved query against bRRAIn telemetry that fires when a condition is met:

  • Vault search for a specific term returns more than N results in 24 hours.
  • A specific extension's error rate crosses a threshold.
  • A new record is added to a specific zone.
  • A member with a specific role signs in.

Custom alerts can fire into any channel via the same routing rules.

Notification history

Every notification fired by the Notifier is logged. Notifications → History is the search interface — filter by time, type, severity, recipient, and channel. Click any entry to see the full payload that was delivered.

History retention follows your audit-log retention policy.

Testing

You can fire a test notification from any rule's edit dialog. The test is clearly tagged as a test (subject prefix, payload flag) so it doesn't trip your real on-call. Use this when adding a new channel or rotation.

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