Retries
Automatic retry with exponential backoff for failed notification deliveries — up to 5 attempts over ~2 hours.
Alphorn automatically retries failed notification deliveries with exponential backoff. No configuration needed — retries are built in.
Retry Behavior
When a delivery fails (network error, service unavailable, rate limit), Alphorn retries up to 5 times with increasing delays:
| Attempt | Delay |
|---|---|
| 1st retry | ~30 seconds |
| 2nd retry | ~2 minutes |
| 3rd retry | ~8 minutes |
| 4th retry | ~30 minutes |
| 5th retry | ~2 hours |
Delays use exponential backoff with jitter to avoid thundering herd problems.
Failure Notifications
If all 5 retries fail, Alphorn marks the delivery as permanently failed. You can configure failure notifications to alert you when a channel stops working — for example, send a notification to a backup channel when your primary Slack channel fails.
Delivery Status
Each notification delivery has a status:
| Status | Description |
|---|---|
queued | Waiting to be processed |
delivered | Successfully sent to the channel |
retrying | Failed, scheduled for retry |
failed | All retries exhausted |
Delivery Logs
View delivery history in the dashboard:
- Timestamp of each attempt
- HTTP status code from the channel
- Error message (if failed)
- Retry count
What Counts as Failure
- HTTP 5xx responses (server error)
- Network timeouts
- Connection refused
- DNS resolution failures
HTTP 4xx responses (client error) are not retried — they indicate a configuration problem (wrong API key, invalid URL, etc.) that retrying won't fix.