Alerts are not arriving

First: is it detection or delivery?

Look at the most recent run outcome.

Outcome	Meaning
notified	Watcher delivered on at least one channel. If you did not see it, look at the channel itself.
notify-failed	Every channel failed. Watcher knows, and has queued the alert for retry.
anything else	Nothing was ever sent — this is a detection question. See Why didn’t my watch fire?

notify-failed — what happens automatically

You do not need to do anything for the alert to be retried:

1. The formatted alert is stored durably with the watch’s state.
2. The next run of that watch replays it before collecting anything — no source is fetched and no model call is spent.
3. On success the event is finally marked as notified, so you will not get it twice.
4. On failure the attempt count rises. After five attempts the alert is given up on.

Caution

Giving up is silent — there is no separate notification for it. Repeated notify-failed outcomes in a watch’s run history are the signal that a channel is broken rather than flaky.

Telegram checklist

Symptom	Cause	Fix
Alerts print to the console instead of sending	No bot token or chat id configured	Set telegram_bot_token and telegram_chat_id; GET /config/status shows both as booleans
Telegram sendMessage failed (400 …)	Wrong chat id, or the bot was never messaged	Message the bot once from the target chat, then re-read the chat id from getUpdates
403 Forbidden	The bot was blocked or removed from the group	Unblock, or re-add the bot
Alerts arrive in the wrong chat	A per-channel chatId override on the watch	Check the watch’s channels entry
Health alerts go somewhere unexpected	TELEGRAM_ADMIN_CHAT_ID is set	That is what it is for; unset it to send them to the normal chat

Push (Android) checklist

Symptom	Cause	Fix
FCM: no registered devices for this owner	The app has not registered a token for this account	Sign in to the app; it registers on sign-in and refresh
FCM auth failed	The service-account JSON is wrong or malformed	Re-paste FIREBASE_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_JSON verbatim
Some devices get it, others do not	Stale tokens	Watcher prunes tokens the provider reports as gone; sign in again on the affected device
Nothing arrives while the app is closed	Device notification permissions or quiet hours	Check the app’s notification settings

Note

A push-only watch on an account with no registered device fails delivery every time — the notifier treats “nobody to deliver to” as a failure, so the alert is queued rather than lost. Add Telegram as a second channel if you want a belt-and-braces route.

The email channel

It does not send email. It logs to the console. This is a known gap — see Known limitations. Transactional account email (verification, password reset) is a separate feature that does work.

Verifying delivery end to end

pnpm run-due:force

on a watch you expect to fire, then compare:

• the printed outcome,
• the watch’s run history,
• and what actually arrived on the channel.

If the outcome is notified and nothing arrived, the problem is between Watcher and the channel provider, not inside Watcher.