Errors before they page you

Route uptime and error emails into Instinct for conversational awareness. Keep real paging in your monitor.

Outcome

Instinct can summarize new issues, say whether something is still firing, and connect an incident to the deploy you shipped an hour earlier. You still keep real paging in Better Stack or Sentry: Instinct adds conversational situational awareness.

What gets sent

Issue / incident title, severity or status, project or service name
First / last seen, short failure cause when included
Link back to the Better Stack incident (or Sentry issue)
Event type: started / resolved / reopened

How to send

Goal: one email lands in your bot today.

Copy your bot address from Instinct → Settings. (Don't email a placeholder: use your real bot inbox.)

On Instinct: Copy your bot address from Settings

In Better Stack go to Uptime → Integrations → Exporting data → Outgoing e-mails → Add.

On Better Stack: Add outgoing email for incidents

Add your bot address as the recipient.

On Better Stack: Add your bot address

Enable events: New incident started, Resolved, and optionally Reopened.

On Better Stack: Enable New incident and Resolved

Customize the subject to something stable, e.g. Better Stack: $NAME ($STATUS).

On Better Stack: Customize the subject

Save the integration, then trigger a test monitor blip (or wait for the next real incident) and confirm Instinct received it.

On Better Stack: Save and test

Subject: "Better Stack: $NAME ($STATUS)" Incident: $NAME Status: $STATUS Started: $STARTED Link: $URL

Other ways · If you use Sentry

Sentry alert rules cannot email a random non-member address. Pick one workaround:

1. Forward workaround (usually easiest)

Keep Sentry alerts emailing you.

Create an inbox filter: From Sentry → forward to your Instinct bot address.

Limit to high-priority production issues so Instinct isn't spammed.

2. Invite workaround

Invite your bot address as a Sentry org member (if it can receive/verify the invite), then create an Issue Alert → Send a notification via email targeting that member.

3. Webhook → email

Sentry webhook → Zapier/Make → email the bot when you need custom formatting. Template: Subject: "Sentry {level}: {project} ({title})" Status: {status} Culprit: {culprit} First seen: {first_seen} Link: {permalink}

Tips & gotchas

Cap volume: email Instinct on new issues or incidents, not every event occurrence.
Strip or avoid PII in custom bodies: error payloads sometimes contain user emails or tokens.
Instinct is a side channel: keep on-call routing in Better Stack / Sentry / PagerDuty as the system of record.
Sentry: hard to email non-members; prefer Better Stack's native outgoing email when you can.