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Making IT systems smart using Slack

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slackLogoKeeping the IT systems up and running efficiently is a challenging task and to ensure their performance a huge variety of tracking and monitoring systems are used. If something in the system goes down, it is very important to notify the development teams timely and efficiently so that they can start their firefighting and ensure maximum uptime and performance.

We at Naukri are no different than other IT organizations. We too use many tracking, monitoring and notifications systems to ensure maximum uptime and high performance and to notify the development teams we primarily use email alerts. The problem with email notifications is, that not everyone checks it and chances of getting these emails missed, ignored, lost or archived( of course unwantedly J ) are high. So we had to come up with a better approach.

Slack

We are using slack as our internal communicator across teams and slack provides a number of APIs to extend it’s functionality. We decided to use it for sending real time notifications to the concerned stakeholders.

One such API is Incoming Webhooks.

Incoming Webhooks are a simple way to post messages from external sources into Slack. They make use of normal HTTP requests with a JSON payload, which includes the message text and some options. Message Attachments can also be used in Incoming Webhooks to display richly-formatted messages that stand out from regular chat messages.

Set up an incoming webhook integration in your Slack team to try it out.

Best part of using Slack is that it provides applications for all platforms windows/MAC/iOS & Android for desktop as well as mobile devices. So we can install slack on all platforms which we use and won’t miss any important notification.

We have currently implemented slack in two of our monitoring systems:-

  • NewMonk – A web site performance and error tracking system.
  • Mobile app crash error reporting system.

Mobile App Screenshot:-

SlackMobImage

Windows App Screenshot:-

SlackDeskImage

We can customize the messages (alert, warning, error, success) which are sent to slack.

Thinking of where to use it?

Well, In IT organizations we face some common problems as “Systems are very slow”, “Memory Issues”, “jobs taking too much time”, “Server Down” etc.

To make our IT systems smart enough, we can make use of slack. We can write programs and configure slack, to send notifications in case of possible unwanted event, report trends on daily, weekly or monthly basis, send warning alerts to avoid a possible issue before it actually occurs.

In short, stay updated about everything that is happening to our systems, act timely and hence ensure a much higher uptime, quality and performance is delivered to our users.

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