Notifications
6 min read
Notifications let you know when something needs attention. They arrive through two separately enabled routes: email and the dashboard (the bell icon in the toolbar).
What you are notified about
- Approvals: one is pending, or an agent has asked you a question.
- Chat replies: an agent replied while you were away from the conversation. The panel keeps one notification per conversation, with the latest reply and how many messages it holds, and removes it from pending when you open it.
- Agents: one failed, ran out of provider allowance, has an expired credential, or raised an alert.
- Cost: an agent crossed its maximum usage rate, or the context loaded on each step is using up its allowance.
- Servers: a machine has spent too long over its CPU, RAM, or load threshold.
- Backups: a backup failed or was empty.
- Models: a connection's Claude subscription is about to expire (30 and 7 days out).
- Plan and payments: a trial ends, the plan is downgraded, the grace period ends, or a charge succeeds or fails.
- Platform notices: maintenance and new features we publish.
Agent alerts
An alert is the notice an agent sends when something cannot wait: a service has broken, there is a risk requiring attention, or it needs human intervention to continue. It is one-way; the agent does not remain blocked waiting for a response.
Do not use it as a progress update or to confirm that a task has ended. Routine notices make important alerts less useful.
| Severity | When to use it |
|---|---|
| Information | A relevant situation worth knowing about, without immediate urgency. |
| Warning | Something that needs attention soon or could become a problem. |
| Error | A service, process, or resource is actually blocked or has failed. |
Who receives them
Kujira resolves recipients in this order:
- Thread participants. In a one-to-one conversation, the alert reaches the people participating in it. A notice about a private conversation is therefore not automatically distributed to the rest of the organization.
- Recipients configured in the channel. If an alert starts in a group, scheduled task, or context without a particular person, it uses the list selected in that channel.
- Nobody. An empty recipient list does not mean “all administrators”: it means those collective alerts interrupt nobody.
Set alert recipients in channel configuration so notices from that source always have clear owners.
Approvals follow a different rule
An approval needs a decision to unblock the agent. If it finds neither configured recipients nor a person responsible for the thread, it escalates to organization owners and administrators. Alerts do not escalate automatically.
Alerts do not replace an approval
An alert informs and the agent may continue. If an action needs a human decision before it runs, it must create an approval.
Choose what you receive
In My account › Notifications, settings are per organization: choose an organization from the list and adjust its notification table, choosing email, dashboard, both, or neither for every type.
If you belong to several organizations and want the same setup for all of them, use Apply this configuration to all.
Recipients depend on the notice
Technical, plan, and model subscription notices go to owners and administrators, but only to those who can see what the notice is about. If you remove an administrator's permission to view servers, they stop receiving server notices; the same goes for agents, backups, billing, and model connections.
Platform notices reach the whole team. Alerts, questions, and conversations follow the thread context or the recipients you selected in its channel.
How many notifications arrive
Each kind of notification has a limit, applied before deciding where it goes: past the limit, that notification does not arrive by any channel. So if several agents notify the same thing at once, or one repeats it in a loop, you receive the first ones, not all of them.
What is behind the notification is not lost: an agent still over its rate notifies again once the window has passed.
Approvals and questions from agents have no limit: each one notifies, because an agent is waiting for a decision. Plan, payment, subscription and platform notifications have no limit either.
On several devices
If you use Kujira in more than one place (the browser, the desktop app and your phone), a notification doesn't reach you twice:
- While you are using the dashboard on any of them, your phone doesn't buzz. "In use" means the window in front of you that you touched in the last two minutes. The desktop app's card on another computer doesn't pop up either. The notification stays in the bell as usual.
- What you read in one place goes away from the others: from the count on the other dashboards, from the desktop card and from the phone notification.
In the dashboard
The bell icon in the toolbar opens the notifications panel, a column on the right side of the screen (on mobile it fills the screen). You can also open and close it with Ctrl + . or ⌘ + ., and Esc closes it.
Notifications are grouped by day, oldest at the top and most recent at the bottom, and the panel always opens on the latest. Each agent notification shows the agent's avatar, and hovering the time shows the full date. Select a notification to go to where the event occurred; it is marked as read.
- Eye (top, Hide read / Show read): hides or shows notifications you have already read. They are hidden by default, and the browser remembers your choice.
- All / Agents / System (under the title): shows every notification, only your agents' ones, or only Kujira's (servers, payments, devices and platform notices). View all has the same filter.
- Mark all read and View all (bottom): the first marks everything as read and clears the counter; the second opens the full list.
Reply from the notification
Agent approvals and questions can be handled without leaving the panel: Approve or Reject for an approval and, for a question, one button per option (up to three) and, if the agent accepts free text, a box to reply. When you decide, the panel closes and the agent receives your answer. To approve you need the Resolve approvals permission.
If the panel cannot tell for certain which approval or question a notification refers to, it offers no buttons: Open in the chat takes you to the conversation so you can decide there.
Every alert also has a unique code (ALT-…) used to refer to a specific notice with a colleague or support. Next to its link, it lets you reach that exact alert, even when you need to switch organizations to open it.
Dashboard notifications are retained for 90 days.
Browser notifications
On the same screen, you can also ask the dashboard to notify you when an agent finishes a task you requested: select the agent and session, with a subtle sound or a browser notification when the tab is in the background.
This is stored only in this browser; it is not an account preference.
In the desktop app, these notifications appear as cards that let you reply to agents and handle approvals without opening the dashboard.