## Overview
Notifications are used to alert users when parts of the IT infrastructure that is being monitored is not in a healthy stable state.
Notifications can be sent for a range of items within Opsview, including:
Hosts (DOWN/UNREACHABLE/FLAPPING/RECOVERY)
Service Checks (WARNING/CRITICAL/UNKNOWN/FLAPPING/RECOVERY)
Business Service (OFFLINE / IMPACTED / RECOVERY / AVAILABILITY BELOW:)Hosts and
Business Component (FAILED / IMPACTED / RECOVERY / AVAILABILITY BELOW:)
As part of a standard Opsview Monitor installation, Users can be notified via a variety of methods such as email, RSS, Push for iOS or Android, PagerDuty and more. For more information, go to the [Notification Methods](🔗) page.
Service Checks can be grouped based on Hashtags or Host Groups also, allowing you to say:
If any Host within the Host Group 'My Servers' changes to the state 'DOWN', send me an email.
If any Service Check tagged with '#criticalServices' changes to the state 'CRITICAL', send a message into the #support channel via Slack'.
Notification Profiles can be created at a per User level or at a Role level and allow to associate Objects to Notification Methods with a time in the day (for example: email notification about my website issues from 9am to 5pm, Monday to Friday and if the issue is still happening after two hours, use PagerDuty'.
Within [Notification Profiles](🔗), you can also specify other options including as of when an alert should be sent or stopped being sent or if notes should be included.