Telegram alert bot with Python: monitor your bot.

Your bot runs 24/5 on a VPS, but you don't watch the screen all day. How do you know it executed an order, hit a target, or — importantly — crashed with an error? The elegant answer: a Telegram bot that pings your phone on every event. It's simple to set up, free, and turns Telegram into a real tool (very different from signal groups). Let's get to the code.

01Create the bot in BotFather

Telegram has an official bot for creating bots — BotFather. The process takes 1 minute:

02Get your chat ID

The bot needs to know where to send. You need your chat ID. The simple way: send any message to your bot, then query:

# get_chat_id.py — run once
import requests, os

TOKEN = os.getenv("TELEGRAM_TOKEN")
url = f"https://api.telegram.org/bot{TOKEN}/getUpdates"
resp = requests.get(url).json()

# send a message to the bot BEFORE running this
for r in resp.get("result", []):
    chat = r["message"]["chat"]
    print(f"Chat ID: {chat['id']} ({chat.get('first_name')})")

Note the number that appears — it's your chat ID, which also goes into the .env.

03Send a message (the base function)

The heart of it all — a function that sends a message. Two ways: with requests (simpler, no dependency) or with the python-telegram-bot library (more complete). For alerts, requests is enough:

# telegram_alert.py
import requests, os

TOKEN = os.getenv("TELEGRAM_TOKEN")
CHAT_ID = os.getenv("TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID")

def send_alert(message: str):
    url = f"https://api.telegram.org/bot{TOKEN}/sendMessage"
    data = {
        "chat_id": CHAT_ID,
        "text": message,
        "parse_mode": "HTML",   # allows bold, etc.
    }
    try:
        requests.post(url, data=data, timeout=10)
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"Failed to send Telegram: {e}")

# test
send_alert("✅ Alert bot connected!")

04Integrate with your bot

Now the good part: calling send_alert() on your bot's important events. Taking the loop from our MT5 bot or Binance bot:

from telegram_alert import send_alert

while True:
    try:
        df = pull_candles(...)
        signal = compute_signal(df)

        if signal == "BUY" and not has_position():
            result = buy(...)
            send_alert(f"🟢 BUY executed\n"
                       f"Asset: ES | Price: {result.price}\n"
                       f"Stop: {stop} | Target: {target}")

        time.sleep(60)
    except Exception as e:
        # ERROR alert — the most important of all
        send_alert(f"🔴 BOT ERROR!\n{str(e)}")
        time.sleep(30)

05Going further: commands (with caution)

The bot can go beyond just notifying — it can receive your commands (e.g. /status to see positions, /stop to shut the bot down). That uses the python-telegram-bot library and the logic of reading updates. But here comes a serious caution:

06Frequently asked questions