Failure alerts

Failure alerts are available on the Solo and Agency plans. The Free plan does not include alerts; failures are visible in the delivery log but no email is sent. See limits reference for the full per-plan matrix.

An alert email fires when a per-form failure streak crosses the configured threshold. The default threshold is 3; configurable per form between 1 and 20.

• A “failure” means the delivery log row is in state FAILED, either a permanent Slack rejection or a retry-exhausted transient error.
• The streak counter resets on the first DELIVERED row.
• Once an alert fires, RouteForms suppresses further alerts on the same form for 60 minutes to avoid email flooding during a sustained outage.

Configuration lives on each form's Settings → Alerts tab in the RouteForms dashboard. The fields:

• Threshold: number of consecutive failures before an alert fires (default 3).
• Recipients: email addresses to notify. Defaults to the form owner. Add teammates explicitly; the form owner can't be removed.
• Enabled: toggle off for forms where you don't want alerts (e.g. forms in maintenance).

The email body contains the form name, the failure count, the most recent Slack error string, and a link to the delivery log.

Subject: [RouteForms] Delivery failing — {{form_name}}

Form: {{form_name}}
Streak: {{failure_count}} consecutive failures
Most recent error: {{slack_error_string}}
Last attempt: {{timestamp}}

Open delivery log: https://app.routeforms.com/forms/{{form_id}}/log

The error string is Slack's exact response, useful to paste into /tools/slack-webhook-error-decoder for the plain-English fix.

The recipient list is computed at alert-send time, not at form-create time. The order:

1. The form's explicit alert recipients.
2. The form owner (always included).
3. On the Agency plan, the workspace admins of the form's parent workspace if no per-form recipients are set.

Each recipient is sent the same email body; no per-recipient customisation.

Standard triage path:

1. Open the delivery log link in the email; check the failed rows.
2. Read the Slack error string. Decode via the error-decoder tool if unclear.
3. Apply the fix (rotate webhook, re-bind channel, edit template). See form-to-slack-troubleshooter for the guided diagnostic.
4. Submit a real test response. Verify the next delivery log row is DELIVERED; this resets the streak counter.

Alerts are reactive, they fire after failures have already happened. For mission-critical flows, layer additional monitoring:

• Run the setup checker after any config change.
• Audit the delivery log on a regular cadence (weekly for high-stakes flows).
• Add a second teammate to the form's alert recipients so a single person's muted email doesn't hide failures.

• Delivery logs, the source of truth alerts read from
• Retries & idempotency
• Slack webhooks, possible failure modes