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Slack app for monitoring backend services #1
Description
Overview
When backend services go down, it would be convenient if the relevant team could be notified on Slack so they can address the issue.
Action Items
- Create a Slack app with "incoming webhooks" enabled.
- For each team that wants to use the Slack app, create a webhook that's connected to the channel they want to receive notifications in.
- Each team can connect to their webhook from whatever backend services they're using. This would have to be done on a team-by-team basis.
Resources/Instructions
These are the Slack instructions for creating an app with incoming webhooks. https://api.slack.com/messaging/webhooks
Note that our slack account is limited to 10 apps, and we've already got 10 installed. So in order for this to work, one of those other apps would have to be bumped.
Activity
ExperimentsInHonesty commentedon Feb 7, 2022
VRMS already has a app installed. We need to review this and update this app to take in webhooks and have a queue that processes messages, so that any project at hfla can use it for any message its wants to send either on a schedule or one time.
Related issues
hackforla/website#1543
hackforla/VRMS#146
We already have a vrms bot to start with
fyliu commentedon Feb 24, 2022
Looks like slackbot.js is using the send message api to send messages to a channel rather than going through a webhook.
https://github.com/hackforla/VRMS/blob/a4642fa7016ae0aff7a5c08a0c332b9538d3d903/backend/workers/slackbot.js#L51
It's actually incredibly easy to create a slackbot and add webhooks to it that make posts to specific channels. It's all clicking buttons on the slack website. I've done so and did the quick test in less than 10 mins including creating a new separate workspace to test it in. Just follow the instructions in the Resources link.
HfLA Projects will need to keep the webhook urls secret and can just post messages to them in order to have the messages appear in their channels.
We will have to get access to the VRMS app as collaborators if we don't want to bump that app off the workspace. I'm not sure if VRMS still uses the app. The code in their repo that uses the token isn't deployment-ready, although it looks like it would've worked at one point from a local instance of VRMS. The code hardcodes localhost:3000.
fyliu commentedon Mar 1, 2022
I went to the VRMS meeting just now and got confirmation from David Rubinstein and the VRMS team that they are not using the slack app for anything. They agreed that it's okay to remove it and make a new one.
Next steps:
fyliu commentedon Mar 8, 2022
fyliu commentedon Jun 12, 2022
I stopped working on this and I've unassigned myself.
Here's my brain dump of where this left off.
Someone else seems to be working on the same thing over at VRMS although I can't find an issue for it on their issues tracker.
I had a slack conversation with Tim Shaker, must be before May 12, about his work on a similar or maybe the same slack app/bot we're talking about here. He replicated some VRMS tables like user, project, meeting and was going to generate reminder messages. This is roughly what I remember.
fyliu commentedon Jun 12, 2022
Somehow I'm not able to upload a screenshot right now, but here's the relevant VRMS message from May 16, 2022 about his slack app project that I'm still able to see:
7:11 PM
Tim Shaker
You can try out the Slackbot in this Slack workspace:
https://join.slack.com/t/vrms-dev/shared_invite/zt-19286euad-hDHJhzR4vttlJryxz1Is2g (edited)
3 remaining items
fyliu commentedon Jul 17, 2022
Here is the issue where Tim is working on his Slack app 100Automations/futureautomations#8
ExperimentsInHonesty commentedon Nov 13, 2022
closing this issue in favor of a new format for gathering requirements for a new bot platform #67