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Telegram

Alerts are sent by a Telegram bot that you own — InfraInbox never uses a shared bot, so nothing you receive passes through anyone else’s account.

Create the bot

Section titled “Create the bot”
  1. In Telegram, open a chat with @BotFather, Telegram’s own bot for making bots.
  2. Send /newbot, then answer its two questions: a display name, and a username ending in bot.
  3. BotFather replies with a token like 123456789:AAE….

Anyone with the token can post as your bot, so treat it like a password. If it ever leaks, send /revoke to @BotFather and paste the new token into InfraInbox.

Add the destination

Section titled “Add the destination”
  1. Go to Add Telegram destination and paste the bot token.
  2. Click Find my chats. InfraInbox polls Telegram for a few seconds — while it does, message the bot directly, add it to a group, or make it an administrator of a channel, and it appears in the list. This works even on a LAN-only server: the check is entirely outbound.
  3. Pick the chat (and, for a forum-style group, the topic) from the list.

If you’d rather not wait for discovery, enter the chat ID directly instead:

Chat ID looks like
A private chat A plain number: your own user ID, e.g. 123456789
A group A negative number, e.g. -123456789
A supergroup or channel A number starting -100, e.g. -1001234567890
A public channel Its @username

To find a supergroup or channel’s number, copy a link to any message in it (Telegram Desktop or Web): t.me/c/1234567890/55 means chat ID -1001234567890.

Check it works

Section titled “Check it works”

Save the destination, then click Send test. You should get a message in the chat within a few seconds; if you don’t, re-check the chat ID and that the bot is actually a member (or admin, for a channel).

What alerts look like

Section titled “What alerts look like”

Each alert is one HTML message: a severity marker, the title, the source and resource it’s about, the detail body, and links back to the incident and (where the source gave one) the sender’s own view. Telegram edits that same message in place as the incident changes — acknowledged, snoozed, resolved — rather than sending a new one each time, so a chat doesn’t fill up with a dozen messages about one problem. A message that would run past Telegram’s 4096-character limit is split into up to three.

Options

Section titled “Options”
  • Send recovery and state updates — off, and you’re only told when something breaks, never when it clears.
  • Enabled — off holds the destination without deleting it.
  • Quiet-hours threshold — the severity floor this destination still hears during quiet hours.

Rotating the bot token

Section titled “Rotating the bot token”

If the token leaks, get a fresh one from @BotFather (/revoke then /newbot output, or just ask BotFather for a new token on the same bot) and paste it into this destination’s edit form — the chat stays the one you already picked.

Limits

Section titled “Limits”

Telegram enforces roughly one message per second per chat and 20 per minute per group; InfraInbox paces sends to stay under that on its own.

Next

Section titled “Next”