This tutorial, we will be sharing how to integrate Monika with Telegram bots so that when there are Monika incidents or recoveries, you will be notified on your Telegram group.

Set up the Telegram bot

First, you need a Telegram account. Head over to https://web.telegram.org to create your account. And then, create a new private chat. Search for an account named “BotFather”. After that, do these steps below:

• Type /newbot and press Enter to create a new bot.
• You will be prompted by BotFather to name your bot. Let’s call it anything you like, such as “Monika Bot”, “Rise and Shine Bot”, or “Open your laptop now! Bot”. The more urgent it sounds, the better! Type your bot name and press Enter.
• After that, you will be prompted by BotFather to enter your bot username. You may see an error because your bot username has been taken by someone else. Type your bot username and press Enter again.
• If you have selected your bot username, you will receive your bot token. Save the token elsewhere as we are going to need them later.

Now the next step is to create a group for the Monika notifications. Create a group in Telegram, and invite your bots into the group. Then, set your bot to be a group administrator.

Now that we have our bot API key and set our bot to be a group administrator, all we need to do is get the group ID. Invite one of the following bots into your group to obtain the group ID:

• getmyid_bot
• getidsbot
• RawDataBot

If those bots are not active anymore, you need to find another bot that can obtain the group ID.

After successfully inviting the Telegram Bot Raw, you'll see the group ID. Save this ID somewhere safe and remove the bot from your group. Now that we have the group ID and bot token, we can proceed to integrate it with Monika.

Integrate Telegram with Monika

Now that we have our Webhook URL, it’s time to create a configuration called monika.yml:

1 notifications:
2   - id: 12f3e1df-3222-4a79-b931-146f964be711
3     type: telegram
4     data:
5       group_id: "<group_id>"
6       bot_token: <bot_token>
7 probes:
8   - id: 48c828bb-b761-41e7-b360-ba0692ded184
9     name: ''
10     requests:
11       - url: https://github.com
12         body: {}
13         timeout: 10000
14     alerts: []

Let me explain a little bit about this configuration:

• You need to set the notification channel in the notifications object. There are 3 properties: id, type, and data. Set the id to any string values, as it is just an identifier. Then, set the type to telegram to set the notification channel to Telegram. After that, put your group ID and bot token notifier webhook URL in group_id and bot_token keys in the data object.
• Monika will be probing https://github.com and will send you an alert if the response time is greater than two seconds or the response status code is not 200, meaning the website is down five times.

Now that we have our configuration ready, it’s time to run it with Monika. Go to the directory where you saved the Monika configuration, and run Monika straight away using monika -c monika.yml

Congratulations! Now that you have successfully integrated Monika with Telegram, you will be notified if your website is slow or down.