> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.webhook.co/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Get alerted when deliveries start failing

> Combine built-in auto-disable and owner email with a poll over dead deliveries and usage to build the alert your on-call needs.

Know before your customers do when a receiver goes dark. Two defenses fire automatically; a short poll turns them into the alert your on-call actually pages on.

## What fires on its own

* **Auto-disable.** After 20 dead deliveries a destination is disabled, so a hard outage stops burning the retry schedule against a dead receiver.
* **Owner email.** The org owner is emailed when a destination auto-disables — a floor, not a paging strategy.

## Build the alert you page on

Poll for `dead` deliveries on a schedule and raise your own alert — a Slack message, a PagerDuty event, whatever your on-call watches.

```sh theme={null}
# in a cron / scheduled job
dead=$(wbhk deliveries list --status dead --all --output json | jq 'length')
if [ "$dead" -gt 0 ]; then
  notify-oncall "webhook.co: $dead dead deliveries"
fi
```

Watch usage in the same job so a runaway sender that's about to pause ingestion pages you before capture stops.

```sh theme={null}
wbhk usage
```

<Note>
  After you fix the receiver, clear the auto-disable and replay the missed events — see [diagnose a
  failing delivery](/recipes/debug-a-failed-delivery). Re-enabling resumes owed deliveries on the
  next wake.
</Note>