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Configuring Slack Alerts
Configuring Slack Alerts

Connecting brainCloud to Slack

Paul Winterhalder avatar
Written by Paul Winterhalder
Updated over a week ago

Introduced in Release 4.5.5, brainCloud now supports Slack Alerts - real-time notifications of important app events and conditions.

Example alerts include:

  • chat - profanity filter violations

  • deploys - app deployments

  • hosting - room servers spinning up / down

  • integration - push notification expiry warnings

  • jobs - background reporting jobs started / completed

  • purchases - customer purchase notifications

Note - Slack alerts are available on all brainCloud plans. Each alert sent adds +1 to the Outgoing Web Services API count.

Procedure

Connecting brainCloud apps to your Slack instance is simple:

  1. Create [one or more] Slack channels

  2. Create an incoming webhook for each Slack Channel

  3. Configure the webhooks in the Slack section of the Design | Integration | Manage Integrations page of the brainCloud Design Portal

Slack instructions

Note - You will need appropriate permissions in your slack instance to perform these steps.

First, create a channel (or channels) to receive Slack alerts. brainCloud not only allows each app to send to a different slack channel - but you can also use separate channels for categories of messages. So organize things the way that you want!

Once you have created your slack channels, you need to create a separate incoming webhook for each channel - and then configure that webhook in brainCloud.

Incoming Webhook

To create an incoming webhook for a channel in Slack:

In the Slack client, click on Your Name in the top-left - then select Settings & Administration and Manage Apps from the menu.

This will bring you to the App Directory. Enter "webhooks" in the top search box, and choose the Incoming Webhooks app from the list.

You will now be on the Incoming Webhooks app page. You may see a list of already configured channels - but we want to add a new webhook. To do that, click on the [Add to Slack] button.

A new page will display, where you can pick the channel to create the webhook for (or create a new channel if you haven't already done so).

Select or create the desired channel, and then click the [Add Incoming WebHook integration] button.

Slack now presents a details page where you can customize specific details of the incoming webhook - like the username that messages will appear from, an icon or emoji to associate with the messages, etc.

None of these details are necessary - as brainCloud will override them with the name of your app (and category emojis) for the messages that we send. You might want to fill in the Description field with the name of the brainCloud App and category that will be associated with this webhook.

Click [Save Settings] when done.

Slack will now present a summary page with the details of your new incoming webhook.

Scroll down to the Webhook URL section and click Copy URL to copy the webhook.

brainCloud Instructions

Now we just need to tell brainCloud to use the webhook that we have created.

First - log into the brainCloud Design Portal and navigate to Design | Integrations | Manage Integrations. Scroll to the Slack section.

Click the [x] Enable Slack integration checkbox, and then copy the slack webhook URL into the field provided. You can click the [Test] button to send a test alert to the channel.

By default, all alert categories are enabled - but you are free to enable/disable individual categories as you would like.

You can provide separate webhooks for individual categories if you would like; if you don't, the default webhook for the app is used. This would allow you to separate Hosting messages (which can be plentiful!) into a separate slack channel.

Finally, you can share channels across apps. You could, for example, send the purchase notifications for all apps to a single slack channel. Fun!

Be sure to click [Save Changes] when you are done.

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Repeat the process for as many apps and channels as you would like!

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