Severity-routed channels

When your app sends a notification for every kind of event into one channel, you scroll past the important ones. Route by severity into colour-coded channels. This is the headline feature of the Python package, and the convention is portable to any language.

The five-channel layout

Severity	Channel	Embed colour	Push setting (mobile)
P0 critical (system down)	#alerts	red 0xFF0000	All Messages + override mute
P1 high (degraded, halts)	#alerts	orange 0xFF8800	All Messages
P2 medium (rejects, spikes)	#info	yellow 0xFFCC00	Only @mentions
P3 info / trades (fills, signups)	#trades or #info	blue / green	All Messages or @mentions, your taste
DEV (deploy, cron, debug)	#dev	gray 0x808080	Muted
AUDIT mirror (every event)	#audit	white 0xFFFFFF	Muted — search history only

Python — use the enums

from discord_alert_transport import (
    Channel, DiscordSender, Severity, build_embed, channel_for, color_for,
)

s = DiscordSender(
    webhooks={
        Channel.ALERTS: "https://discord.com/api/webhooks/<a>/<a-token>",
        Channel.INFO:   "https://discord.com/api/webhooks/<b>/<b-token>",
        Channel.TRADES: "https://discord.com/api/webhooks/<c>/<c-token>",
        Channel.DEV:    "https://discord.com/api/webhooks/<d>/<d-token>",
        Channel.AUDIT:  "https://discord.com/api/webhooks/<e>/<e-token>",
    },
    enabled=True,
)

def notify(sev, title, desc, **fields):
    s.send_embed(
        channel_for(sev),
        build_embed(
            title=title,
            description=desc,
            color=color_for(sev),
            fields=[{"name": k, "value": str(v)} for k, v in fields.items()],
        ),
        content="@everyone" if sev == Severity.P0 else "",
    )

notify(Severity.P0, "DB down",       "Primary unreachable 5min")
notify(Severity.P1, "Auth degraded", "p99 over 2s")
notify(Severity.P2, "Cache miss",    "Hit rate 60% (normally 95%)")
notify(Severity.P3, "Daily report",  "Sales dashboard refreshed")
notify(Severity.DEV, "Deploy",       "v2.1.0 → prod")

Same idea, any language

// Minimal severity router in Node
const CHANNELS = {
  P0: { url: process.env.DISCORD_WEBHOOK_ALERTS, color: 0xff0000 },
  P1: { url: process.env.DISCORD_WEBHOOK_ALERTS, color: 0xff8800 },
  P2: { url: process.env.DISCORD_WEBHOOK_INFO,   color: 0xffcc00 },
  P3: { url: process.env.DISCORD_WEBHOOK_TRADES, color: 0x3399ff },
  DEV:{ url: process.env.DISCORD_WEBHOOK_DEV,    color: 0x808080 },
};

async function notify(sev, title, desc) {
  const { url, color } = CHANNELS[sev];
  await fetch(url, {
    method: 'POST',
    headers: { 'Content-Type': 'application/json' },
    body: JSON.stringify({
      content: sev === 'P0' ? '@everyone' : '',
      embeds: [{ title, description: desc, color, timestamp: new Date().toISOString() }],
    }),
  });
}

Audit mirror (one channel = full history)

For long-term searchability, fire every event a second time as a compact one-liner to #audit. Mute that channel so it doesn’t ping you, but Discord’s free-unlimited history means you have a searchable log of every alert your system has ever fired. The Python package does this automatically; in other languages it’s two fetch/POST calls instead of one.

# Python — built in, no extra code
sender = DiscordSender(webhooks={...}, audit_channel=Channel.AUDIT)
sender.send_embed(Channel.ALERTS, embed)  # also lands in #audit

Why this beats a single firehose

• Triage on the lock screen — red embed = drop everything. Green = ignore.
• Mute different severities differently — sleep through P3 fills, wake for P0.
• Threading — Discord lets you reply to a P0 alert in a thread, keeping incident postmortems attached to the original alert.
• Per-channel role pings — @oncall only fires for P0.
• Postmortem search — six months later, #alerts shows you every major incident with full context.

Next: use cases.