What subscription protocols does OCI Notifications support?

OCI Notifications supports email, SMS (through Oracle-approved carriers), HTTPS webhooks (for custom integrations), PagerDuty (native integration), Slack (via incoming webhooks), OCI Functions (for serverless processing), and custom protocols via HTTPS endpoints. Each topic can have multiple subscriptions across different protocols, so a single notification can simultaneously page an engineer, send a Slack message, create a ticket via webhook, and trigger a remediation function.

How do Notifications integrate with OCI Monitoring Alarms?

OCI Monitoring Alarms trigger notification actions when metric conditions are met. Each alarm can specify notification topics for three states: Firing (condition is true), OK (condition cleared), and Repeat (condition remains true). When an alarm fires, it publishes a structured message to the configured topic, which then delivers to all subscribers. This creates a complete monitoring-to-alerting pipeline: Monitoring collects metrics, Alarms evaluate conditions, and Notifications distribute alerts.

OCI Notification Topic Builder

MonitoringOCI

Build OCI Notifications topic and subscription configs with multi-channel delivery.

Last verified: May 2026

OCI Notifications Configuration

Build OCI Notifications topic and subscription configurations with email, Slack, PagerDuty, and webhook delivery.

Required Fields

compartmentIdtopicsubscriptions

{
  "compartmentId": "ocid1.compartment.oc1..aaaaaaaexample",
  "topic": {
    "name": "critical-alerts-topic",
    "description": "Notification topic for critical infrastructure alerts and incidents",
    "apiEndpoint": "https://cell1.notification.us-ashburn-1.oci.oraclecloud.com"
  },
  "subscriptions": [
    {
      "protocol": "EMAIL",
      "endpoint": "sre-team@example.com",
      "displayName": "SRE Team Email",
      "retryDuration": 7200
    },
    {
      "protocol": "SLACK",
      "endpoint": "https://hooks.slack.com/services/T00000/B00000/XXXXXXXXXXXX",
      "displayName": "Slack #incidents Channel",
      "retryDuration": 7200
    },
    {
      "protocol": "PAGERDUTY",
      "endpoint": "https://events.pagerduty.com/integration/abc123/enqueue",
      "displayName": "PagerDuty Critical Service",
      "retryDuration": 7200
    },
    {
      "protocol": "HTTPS",
      "endpoint": "https://api.example.com/webhooks/oci-notifications",
      "displayName": "Custom Webhook",
      "retryDuration": 3600
    },
    {
      "protocol": "ORACLE_FUNCTIONS",
      "endpoint": "ocid1.fnfunc.oc1.iad.aaaaaaaexample",
      "displayName": "Auto-Remediation Function",
      "retryDuration": 7200
    }
  ],
  "messageFormat": {
    "defaultFormat": "ONS_OPTIMIZED",
    "availableFormats": ["RAW_TEXT", "JSON", "ONS_OPTIMIZED"]
  },
  "freeformTags": {
    "severity": "critical",
    "team": "sre",
    "environment": "production"
  }
}

Generated Output

Output will appear here...

See It in Action

Your team's on-call setup is messy: alarms send to a single email distribution list, alerts get buried in inbox noise, real incidents are missed. The builder generates a tiered notification strategy: 3 topics — `prod-critical` (PagerDuty + on-call SMS), `prod-warning` (Slack #ops), `prod-info` (email digest). Existing alarms are remapped to appropriate topics based on severity. Within a week, on-call escalation effectiveness improves measurably; the team stops missing critical incidents because they're no longer drowning in info-level email noise.

What This Tool Does

OCI Notifications provides a publish-subscribe messaging service for sending alerts and messages to multiple endpoints simultaneously. Topics define the subject of notifications, and subscriptions deliver messages to email addresses, SMS numbers, Slack webhooks, PagerDuty, OCI Functions, and HTTPS endpoints. This builder helps you configure notification topics with subscription endpoints, message formatting, filter policies, and integration with OCI Events and Alarms for automated alerting.

Technical Details

The builder constructs OCI Notifications topic configurations: topic resource (display name, compartment), subscriptions (per-protocol: EMAIL, SMS, HTTPS, PAGERDUTY, SLACK, ORACLE_FUNCTIONS, with the appropriate destination URL/email/phone/function-OCID), and optional message filtering. Output is generated as oci ons topic + oci ons subscription commands and Terraform oci_ons_notification_topic + oci_ons_subscription resources.

Common Use Cases

1Creating a notification topic for production alerts that delivers to PagerDuty for on-call engineers and email for the broader team simultaneously
2Building a topic with multiple subscription protocols — email for human review, HTTPS webhook for automated ticketing, and Function for remediation
3Configuring notification topics for OCI Alarm actions that escalate based on severity — warning alarms to Slack, critical alarms to PagerDuty
4Setting up a topic for budget alerts that notifies finance stakeholders via email when compartment spending exceeds defined thresholds

Common Questions

What subscription protocols does OCI Notifications support?: OCI Notifications supports email, SMS (through Oracle-approved carriers), HTTPS webhooks (for custom integrations), PagerDuty (native integration), Slack (via incoming webhooks), OCI Functions (for serverless processing), and custom protocols via HTTPS endpoints. Each topic can have multiple subscriptions across different protocols, so a single notification can simultaneously page an engineer, send a Slack message, create a ticket via webhook, and trigger a remediation function.
How do Notifications integrate with OCI Monitoring Alarms?: OCI Monitoring Alarms trigger notification actions when metric conditions are met. Each alarm can specify notification topics for three states: Firing (condition is true), OK (condition cleared), and Repeat (condition remains true). When an alarm fires, it publishes a structured message to the configured topic, which then delivers to all subscribers. This creates a complete monitoring-to-alerting pipeline: Monitoring collects metrics, Alarms evaluate conditions, and Notifications distribute alerts.

Expert Tips

TIP

Use SEPARATE topics for different urgency levels — critical alerts go to PagerDuty + SMS, warnings go to Slack, info goes to email. Mixing all severity levels into one topic causes alert fatigue (everything pages) or missed critical events (PagerDuty disabled because of noise).

TIP

Always include the topic OCID in your runbook. When an alert fires, the responder needs to know how to mute the topic, find recent message history, or modify subscriptions. Topics referenced only by name in alerting policies are hard to find during incidents.

TIP

Subscription confirmation is required for email/SMS — subscribers must click a confirmation link before receiving messages. This is a 5-minute step that often gets forgotten, leading to 'why am I not receiving alerts?' incidents during the next firing event.

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