Post: Monitor the delivery path, not just the alarm (ntfy 401 silent-failure health check)#25
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Post: Monitor the delivery path, not just the alarm (ntfy 401 silent-failure health check)#25clarkbw wants to merge 1 commit into
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…failure health check) Draft write-up of the signalk-ntfy-relay v0.2.0 delivery-path health check: an expired ntfy token silently 401'd every alarm to nowhere; the fix is a proactive /v1/account heartbeat + reactive consecutive-failure counting that raises notifications.ntfyRelay.deliveryFailed on a channel independent of the down phone. Generalized to any self-hosted alert pipeline (who-watches-the- watcher / dead-man's-switch). Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Gs2y7PwtAtP63KXzcyNYrc
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Draft blog post for review — do not merge until Bryan approves (merge = publish).
What it covers
The
signalk-ntfy-relayv0.2.0 delivery-path health check. An expired ntfy access token made every SignalK alarm the relay published return401and silently vanish — the whole alarm-to-phone chain went dark, discovered only by accident while smoke-testing an unrelated plugin. Root-caused to the token via a read-onlyGET /v1/account(401), fixed with a proactive heartbeat + reactive consecutive-failure counting that raisesnotifications.ntfyRelay.deliveryFailedon a channel independent of the down phone (dashboard/voice), excluded from being forwarded back through the failing path.Angle
Generalized beyond marine: the "who watches the watcher" / dead-man's-switch blind spot in any self-hosted alert pipeline (ntfy, Gotify, Pushover, HA, PagerDuty webhooks) — you monitor the thing but not the pipe that tells you about the thing. Applies the well-known Prometheus/Alertmanager Watchdog pattern to the outbound leg, done inside the relay rather than with a second service.
SEO
ntfy-401-silent-push-failure-delivery-path-health-check-heartbeat-dead-mans-switchntfy responded 401,401 Unauthorized,GET /v1/account,notifications.ntfyRelay.deliveryFailedChecks
bundle exec jekyll buildsucceeds (the one Liquid warning is a pre-existing issue in an unrelated 2026-06-05 post)signalk-ntfy-relaysource (commits 66890b9 / 650796f, v0.2.0); all 29 plugin tests pass incl. the 4 new health-check tests🤖 Generated with Claude Code
https://claude.ai/code/session_01Gs2y7PwtAtP63KXzcyNYrc