Send your first Qvasa alert to Slack
The shortest useful alert in Qvasa is one number with one threshold, posting to one Slack channel: "tell #cx-queue-alerts when more than 120 tickets come in within an hour." This guide sets that up end to end — connecting Slack, verifying the channel, and building the alert — in about ten minutes. Once it works, everything else (more conditions, email, webhooks, dashboard images) is the same pattern with more switches flipped.
Before you start
You need to be an account admin in Qvasa to connect Slack and verify channels, and you need permission to manage workflows to build the alert. If Alerts & Exports isn't in your sidebar, reach out to the Qvasa team.
In Slack, you need permission to install an app into your workspace. If you don't have it, your Slack admin can do step 1 for you.
The channel you alert into must be a public (non-private) channel. Qvasa can't post into private channels or DMs.
Step 1: Install the Qvasa Alerting Slack app
Go to Settings → Configure Slack. This is the hub for everything Slack-related in Qvasa. Click Qvasa Slack App, then Add to Slack, and approve the install in the Slack window that opens.
The app asks for a deliberately small set of permissions: it can list your channels and post messages to public channels. It cannot read your conversations.
Back on the Slack configuration page you'll see the install confirmed — who installed it, when, and which Slack workspace it connected to. That page is also where you come back later to re-install or remove the app.
Step 2: Verify the channel you want alerts in
Qvasa only posts to channels an admin has explicitly verified, so each channel is added once before it can receive alerts. Pick or create the channel in Slack first — something like #cx-queue-alerts — and make sure it is public.
Then in Qvasa go to Settings → Configure Slack → Verified Slack Channels, paste the channel's Slack Channel ID, and click Verify Channel. Qvasa checks the channel exists and is reachable, pulls in its name, and adds it to the list of destinations your alerts can use.
Use the ID, not the name. The Slack channel ID is an id like C0QVASAALERTS, not #cx-queue-alerts. To find it in Slack: open the channel, click its name at the top, and scroll to the bottom of the About tab — the Channel ID is there with a copy button. (It's also the last segment of the channel's URL.)
You don't need to invite the app to the channel — its permissions let it post to any public channel in your workspace. Adding it as a member anyway is harmless, and makes it obvious in Slack where the messages come from.
Verify every channel you plan to alert into. It is a one-time step per channel, done by an admin, and it is what keeps alerts from being sent to arbitrary places.
Step 3: Build the alert dashboard
Alerts live on their own kind of dashboard. Open Alerts & Exports in the sidebar and click Create New Workflow Alert Condition (Dashboard). Give it a name that says what it watches — "New Ticket Spike Alert" — and open it.
Click Edit in the top bar, add a row, and add one quick stat widget — for this example, Tickets Created. Set its date filter to Last 1 hour. The filter decides what the alert is about: one hour makes this an alert about right now, while a 30-day window would barely move.
Step 4: Put a threshold on the widget
Still in edit mode, click the bell icon on the widget. Fill in four things:
Name — what the alert says when it fires. "More than 120 new tickets in an hour" reads better in Slack at 2am than "Condition 1".
Fixed Number Threshold —
120.Trigger Type — Above threshold.
Recovery Threshold —
80. Optional but worth setting: the alert won't clear until the number drops all the way back to 80, so a queue hovering at 120 can't spam you with breach/resolved messages all afternoon.
Leave the Moving Average section blank — that's for "unusual compared to normal" alerts, and you don't need it for a first one. Click Save Alert Condition.
Step 5: Point it at Slack and give it a schedule
At the top of the dashboard is the alert's command center bar. Two things left:
Under Notifications, click Channels and tick your channel — it appears as Slack: #cx-queue-alerts, the channel you verified in step 2. Click Apply. Tick Also notify on resolve next to it if you want the all-clear posted too.
Under Schedules, click + Add Schedule. The schedule decides how often Qvasa checks the widget — every 15 minutes is a sensible start. It also acts as quiet hours: if the schedule doesn't match, the alert doesn't run, so a business-hours-only schedule means no 3am pages.
You don't have to write the alert message. By default it carries the condition name, the value that breached, the threshold it crossed, and a View Dashboard button. The Alert Message button is there when you want to add your own subject line or a runbook link later.
What done looks like
The status section reads No breach with a next run time, the schedule shows Active, your Slack channel is listed under Notifications, and the widget shows its threshold next to its number. That's a working alert — it now watches the queue whether or not anyone has Qvasa open.
Troubleshooting
"Your account does not have a qvasa slack app configuration." The Slack app isn't installed yet — do step 1 first. The Verify Channel form only appears once it is.
Verifying the channel fails. Two usual causes: you pasted the channel name instead of the ID, or the channel is private. Check both, then try again.
The channel isn't in the Channels list. Only verified channels are offered. Verify it under Settings → Configure Slack → Verified Slack Channels.
The alert isn't running. It needs all three: a widget condition, a schedule, and a notification channel. The status section names whichever one is missing.
No bell on the widget. Bells show only in edit mode, on alert dashboards, and only on widget types that carry a threshold — a quick stat or a donut/bar chart, not a table.
Where to go next
Once this one works, the same dashboard can carry up to five conditions, send to email lists, user groups, webhooks, SMS or PagerDuty alongside Slack, and attach a rendered image of the dashboard to every alert. See Dashboard alerts and scheduled exports: alert on anything, send it anywhere for the full picture, and Scheduling alerts and dashboard exports with cron schedules for business-hours and timezone schedules.