Email Alerts & Inactivity Monitoring
Most automated pipelines fail in silence. Discover how Rilavek watches your incoming streams with automated silence detection, notifying you the moment regular transfers freeze.
The Dead Man's Switch: When continuous data feeds stop transmitting, you rarely get a clean server error. Rilavek tracks transfer heartbeats so you don't discover dropped cameras or dead cron jobs days after the fact.
Why Silence Is The Scariest Failure
When a server crashes or an S3 bucket rejects credentials, logs light up with errors. But when a field camera freezes, a remote router drops LTE signal, or an on-prem backup script hangs before initiating an SFTP handshake, the receiver sees nothing.
Security & CCTV Fleets
A camera knocked offline by weather or power cuts won't send failure logs. Knowing within 24 hours means you don't lose days of footage before an incident occurs.
Nightly Database Dumps
Backup scripts run unattended at 2 AM. If a database lock prevents export creation, the upload never starts. Inactivity alerts flag missing files before disaster recovery tests fail.
Remote IoT Telemetry
Edge devices pushing hourly status reports often operate without public IP addresses or incoming ports. The only practical health check is verifying regular inbound arrivals.
How The Inactivity Monitor Works
Every active pipe has a background health worker that inspects recent ingest timestamps. The logic follows four strict rules designed to eliminate noise:
Baseline Activity Prerequisite
An alert never triggers on freshly created, empty pipes. The monitoring engine checks that a pipe has completed at least one successful file transfer in its lifetime before monitoring silence. Unused pipelines never trigger accidental notifications.
24-Hour Continuous Silence Window
The timer begins running from the timestamp of the last recorded file transfer. If 24 full hours elapse without any new files ingested across any of the pipe's protocols (FTP, SFTP, or HTTPS), the pipeline is marked silent.
Alert Deduplication (Zero Inbox Spam)
Nobody likes receiving hourly alert emails when a partner system goes down over a holiday weekend. Once an inactivity email is sent, further alerts for that pipe are muted. You get a single clear message rather than a flood of repetitive reminders.
Automatic Re-Arming
As soon as the client device comes back online and pushes a fresh file through the pipe, the monitoring engine resets the timestamp and re-arms the inactivity trigger automatically. You don't have to log in and flip any switches back on.
Configuring Inactivity Alerts
Inactivity monitoring is configured per pipe, giving you total control over which streams send alerts.
Step-by-Step Setup:
- Navigate to Pipes in your sidebar and select the pipe you want to monitor.
- Scroll down to the Alerts & Notifications card.
- Click the Email Alerts tab.
- Toggle the 24-Hour Inactivity Alert switch to enabled.
- Click Save Email Alert Settings.
Alerts are delivered to the primary email associated with your Rilavek account. The email includes the pipe name, short identifier, time of the last recorded file, and direct links to inspect transfer logs.
Email Alerts vs. Webhooks
Rilavek provides both human-facing notifications and machine-facing integration hooks. Choose the right tool based on what should respond to the event:
| Capability | 24-Hour Inactivity Alerts | Webhooks |
|---|---|---|
| Target Audience | Human operators, sysadmins, on-call engineers | Automated backends, serverless apps, Zapier, n8n |
| Trigger Frequency | Only when an active pipe is silent for 24 continuous hours | Every single file completion (success or failure) |
| Setup Required | One toggle switch in pipe settings (zero code) | Public HTTPS endpoint with JSON payload handler |
| Delivery Channel | Direct email notification | Signed HTTP POST request with HMAC-SHA256 |
| Best For | Detecting disconnected cameras, power outages, and stalled scripts | Triggering AI processing, database syncs, and per-file logging |