Proactive Slack Alerts From Metrist
Nobody likes to be surprised by major issues or down time. It’s always better to know ahead of time if something big is about to happen, specifically when this impacts your customers or collecting revenue. Metrist provides our customers with the option to receive proactive Slack alerts. Ensuring that you will always be alerted when a third party service that you depend on is not operating as expected.
Below we look at things to consider when building a notification strategy.
Considerations
Audience is key in figuring out the correct formula for your alert strategy. You need to make sure to alert the correct team members at the right time. If you send too many alerts that have no meaning, you’ll risk alert fatigue. Alert fatigue is what happens when a team receives too many alerts and begin to ignore or be less responsive to notifications in the future.
To prevent alert fatigue, consider the following:
- Define your audience: Which individuals or teams within your organization would benefit from knowing a third party is degrading or down?
- Determine the best method of delivery: Are users all in the same Slack workspace? Do some prefer to receive emails?
- Educate your audience: Provide the individuals or teams with a brief overview of any notifications that you sent their way. Make sure each person understands the action/next steps required once an alert has been received.
This will solidify your notification process to ensure the team can take action once they receive an alert.
Another thing to consider is to integrate in with an existing notification process. Such as one your company might have in place for an APM (application performance monitoring) product. Send alerts
Let’s set up Metrist to send proactive Slack alerts
Metrist supports a number of channels that can be used to proactively notify your team (including email, and via web hooks). For this post we will be focusing on Slack.
This is a two part process. Please make sure to complete both parts or you are at risk of not receiving all of the expected notifications.
1) Installing the Metrist Slack app
Follow the steps below to install the Slack app. This requires that you have the permissions to install Slack apps, more details on how to add Slack apps to your workspace are available on the Slack website.
Login to Metrist and from the ‘Profile’ drop down menu in the upper right corner select ‘Install App’ or select this following link: https://app.metrist.io/apps/slack
This will open up either the Slack installation page:
Select the ‘Add to Slack’ button to begin, this will take you to the “Slack Authentication” screen:
Select the Slack workspace you’d like to connect with and review the requested permissions. When you are ready to continue with the installation select ‘Allow’ to complete the connections between Metrist and your Slack workspace!
Metrist offers a number of commands that can be used in Slack (included in the screenshot above). This includes the ability to view the status of any of the service monitors in your Metrist account.
Metrist has now been successfully added to your Slack workspace. Next, you’ll need to subscribe to alerts, follow the steps in the next section to alert a specific Slack channel when Metrist notices a service monitor status change.
2) Add proactive Slack alerts to Metrist
The next step is to identify the best channel to send your notifications. We recommend using any existing channel you have set up for other alerts. If you don’t have a channel, create one named “Metrist” for easy reference.
Setting up proactive Slack alerts
Metrist offer the option to send a notification directly to a user (DM or direct message) or to a Slack channel in your workspace. Metrist notifications (DM to an individual) and subscriptions (to a channel) can be configured in Slack using Slack commands.
The Metrist chat app offers a number of commands. Enter that can be accessed by entering /metrist help.
Follow the steps below receive a notification in a specific Slack channel when the status of your Metrist service monitor changes
Once you have identified the a Slack channel where you’d like to receive notification, in Slack enter the command: /metrist subscription <#channel name>
Note <#channel name> will be replaced with the channel you’d like to use, make sure to add a # in front of the channel name.
The Metrist Slack app will display an option to select the monitors that will notify this channel.
- In the example below there are two monitors already subscribed to send notifications.
- To add/remove subscription, select “add monitors”, or in the example below where it says “2 selected”.
You’ll see a list of the service monitors. For each service monitor listed Metrist will send an alert to the selected channel when their status changes.
Select the text box, you’ll see a list of service monitors in your Metrist account. From here add or remove the service monitors that will trigger an alert when the status changes.
Once you’ve selected the desired service monitors select ‘Save’ to save your changes. Metrist alerts will be sent to Slack when a service monitors status changes.
Not seeing a service monitor that you are expecting? Slack includes the Metrist service monitors that has been added to your Metrist account. Additional service monitors can be viewed in the Metrist web app.
You are all set! You will now receive proactive Slack alerts from Metrist.
If you have any additional questions, don’t hesitate to contact us at support@metrist.io.
