If you’re like most ops teams, you’re heavy users of alerts from your various systems and sensors. Our customers at ThousandEyes are sending out thousands of alert notifications per day. That’s a lot of emails. And although you’re likely also power users of email too, we’re guessing that’s something you’re less happy about. We’re excited to introduce two new integrations that offer you more sustainable (read: less frequent) use of email. So find your favorite chat room or channel (#1000eyes, #tebot, #eyerobot?) and get alerted.
Of ChatOps and ChatBots
We now have two new ways to satisfy your ChatOps cravings: integrations for Slack and HipChat. These integrations now make it super simple to send your ThousandEyes alert and agent notifications to a chat room (or channel), in addition to our previous integration with PagerDuty.
Many of you will already be familiar with, and are using, these popular communications products. So why would you want alerts piped into your chat stream? It’s another set of data that your operations team can use to place events in context.
And that’s the whole idea idea behind ChatOps: you can better run your operations when your tools are embedded directly in the conversations you’re having with your team. Your ThousandEyes alerts can be mixed with other notifications, team communication and ChatBots that you’ve created to help you execute tasks.
How Alert Integrations Work
The Slack and HipChat integrations provide a new way to consume alert and agent notifications, alongside PagerDuty, email and Webhooks. You can completely customize your alerts (web, network, BGP, DNS, voice, etc.) and then choose which alert rules will send notifications to the Slack channel and/or HipChat room of your choice.
To set up the Slack integration, you’ll want to add Incoming Webhooks and use the URL generated to then configure the integration in ThousandEyes. You’ll be asked to add your webhook URL and the Slack channel you want to publish to.
To set up the HipChat integration, you’ll want to go to Addons and Build your Own Integration. From there you will retrieve the URL and auth token which you can then use to configure the integration in ThousandEyes. You’ll be asked to add the URL for your room notifications and the auth token. Check out the knowledge base for more specific directions.
Once you’re up and chatting, new alerts (and cleared alerts) will show up with information on the Alert Rule, the scope, ID and a link to the affected test or dataset within ThousandEyes.
Simple and straightforward! Stay tuned for additional integrations in the future. If you have ideas for others, add them into the feedback link at the bottom of the app. Your inbox will thank you!