Get phone and SMS alerts fromTideways
Tideways is application performance monitoring and profiling for PHP, watching response times, error rates, exceptions and slow SQL in production. Spike turns every Tideways notification into an incident and pages the engineer on call — by phone, SMS, Slack, or email — escalating until someone picks it up.
Set up with AI
I use Tideways for monitoring and Spike for on-call and incident management. Walk me through connecting them: create a Tideways integration in Spike, copy its webhook URL, and add that webhook to Tideways alert settings. Then help me send a test alert to confirm incidents show up in Spike.
What is Tideways?
Tideways is an application performance monitoring and profiling platform built specifically for PHP. Its extension sits in production and samples real requests, so a slow checkout is traced to the SQL query, the HTTP call, or the template that actually cost the time, rather than guessed at from a dashboard. Teams running Symfony, Laravel, Magento, Shopware, or WordPress use it to watch response times and error rates per transaction, to catch exceptions and slow queries as they appear, and to compare a release against the one before it.
Tideways raises a notification the moment one of those checks goes wrong — a response time or error rate crossing its critical threshold, a new exception group, a new slow SQL query, or a service that has simply stopped sending data. Those notifications land in email and in the Tideways UI, which is fine while someone is watching and useless at 3am. Pointed at Spike through a webhook, each one becomes an incident instead: the on-call engineer is called and texted within seconds, and an alert nobody acknowledges climbs the escalation policy until a human answers.
The incident is titled with what Tideways actually said. A threshold breach reads “Response time up 23% (1,234 vs 1,000 threshold) on storefront” — the check, how far past the line it went, and the project — so whoever wakes up knows the size of the problem from a lock screen. An exception is titled with PHP’s own sentence: “Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 32768 bytes)”. The link back into Tideways, the application, and whatever else the notification carried — the transaction, the service, the environment — ride along on the incident for the digging that follows.
Repeats stay together, because Tideways gives each one an identity Spike keys on: a breach carries its incident ID through every re-notification, and an exception or slow query carries its error-group ID. A check that keeps breaching appends events to the one open incident instead of paging the team once per evaluation, and the same exception thrown again joins the thread it already belongs to — while a second, unrelated problem opens an incident of its own, so one noisy transaction never hides another. Which projects page which rotation is decided in Spike, where alert rules read the check, the application and the rest of the payload before it reaches anyone — the same routing that sits in front of New Relic and Datadog.
Closing up is Tideways’ job too. A response time that comes back under its threshold is sent again as closed, and an exception group somebody marks “resolved”, “not an error” or “ignored” arrives carrying that new state — either way Spike matches it back by the same ID and resolves the incident. The alert goes quiet in Tideways and the page goes quiet in Spike at the same moment, the way it does for Sentry and the rest of your error tracking.
How to set up Tideways alerts
One Spike webhook URL, added once in Tideways for the whole organisation and then ticked on per project — no agents, no code.
Step 1: Create a Tideways integration in Spike
In your Spike dashboard, open Integrations and choose Tideways. Spike generates a unique webhook URL for this integration — copy it, and attach the integration to the service and escalation policy that should answer these alerts.
Step 2: Add the webhook in Tideways
In Tideways, go to Organizations → Integrations → Add New Integration and pick Webhook. Give it a name and paste the Spike URL — Tideways accepts HTTPS endpoints only, which Spike's URL already is. The webhook is created once for the whole organisation.
Step 3: Switch the webhook on per project — and tick “when the alert is fixed”
The webhook does nothing until a project asks for it. In each project, open Project Settings → Notifications and tick the Spike webhook beside the checks worth waking someone for. Tick “and when the alert is fixed” beside it too: that toggle is what makes Tideways send the closing notification, and without it an incident pages your rotation and then never resolves itself.
Step 4: Watch a breach become an incident
Let a monitored threshold break — or wait for the next real one — and confirm Spike opens an incident within seconds and pages whoever is on call. While the problem persists, Tideways re-notifies and Spike adds those events to the same incident rather than paging again; when Tideways reports it fixed, the incident resolves itself.
Step 5: Keep informational alerts off the phone
Weekly reports, releases and release comparisons are informational — most teams leave them unticked, or route them with a Spike alert rule so they never reach a phone. They carry no closing event, so if you do send them, set the integration's resolve timer and they close themselves once the window passes. The same goes for missing-data alerts.
That's it — Tideways alerts now page whoever is on call.
