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The AppSignal Slack app sends real-time notifications to your Slack channels when events happen in your monitored applications. Get notified about errors, slow requests, deploys, metric alerts, heartbeat alerts, process monitor alerts and log alerts without leaving Slack. Notifications are two-way. An incident’s message carries controls to close or reopen it, change its assignees, or set its severity, and AppSignal edits the message whenever the incident changes, whether in Slack or in AppSignal. Every action is written to the incident’s logbook under your linked AppSignal user. Website: Slack.com
The Slack app is an AppSignal Labs beta. If you set up a Slack notifier before its release, see Migrating an existing notifier.

Installation

  1. Go to Notifications in your AppSignal organization and select Add new notifier.
  2. Choose Slack from the list of notifiers.
  3. Under Configure this integration, select Install Slack notifier to start the Slack authorization flow.
  4. In Slack, authorize the AppSignal app for your workspace and select the channel to post to.
  5. You are redirected back to AppSignal, where the notifier appears under Active notifiers.
  6. Select Manage next to the notifier to finish setting it up.

Open your notification settings

Configuration

Select Manage next to a notifier on the Notifications page to configure it. The page has four sections:
  • Settings for this notifier — the notifier’s name, such as “Critical errors” or “Operations alerts”. Edit configuration on Slack opens the notifier’s settings in Slack.
  • Scope notifier to the following apps — the apps and environments this notifier covers.
  • Enable notifier for new applications — when enabled, every app and environment you add later uses this notifier by default.
  • Send notifications for the following events — deploys, errors and performance traces. Errors and performance can be filtered by namespace: select the namespaces you want, or deselect all of them to cover every namespace.
Alerts from triggers are not enabled here. Anomaly detection, log and check-in triggers each choose the notifiers they send to, so add this notifier on the trigger itself. Notifiers are organization-wide, and you can create several Slack notifiers to send different events to different channels.

What notifications look like

Each Slack notification includes contextual details about the event:
  • Errors include the exception name, message, first lines of the backtrace, the action and request path.
  • Performance traces include the action name, duration, request method and path.
  • Deploy markers include the revision (with a link to compare changes when available), namespace and deploying user.
  • Metric alerts include the trigger name, current value, tags and a link to the alert in AppSignal.
  • Heartbeat and process monitor alerts include the identifier and expected completion time.
  • Log alerts include the trigger name, severity and the matching log message.

What you can do from a notification

Error and performance incident notifications carry controls. Deploy markers and alerts are posted without controls.
  • Close incident — closes the incident. The message then shows “Closed by” and your name, and the button becomes Reopen incident.
  • Reopen incident — reopens a closed incident.
  • Change assignees — opens a dialog listing the members of that app. Search by name and select as many as you need.
  • Change severity — opens a dialog to set the incident’s severity: untriaged, critical, high, low, or informational.
AppSignal writes each action to the incident’s logbook, under the user linked to your Slack account.

Messages stay current

AppSignal edits a Slack message when the incident it describes changes state, severity, or assignees. Changes you make in AppSignal count too. A channel then reads as the current state of your apps, not a list of alerts you have already handled.

Linking your Slack account

AppSignal needs to know which AppSignal user is behind a Slack action. The first time you use one, AppSignal asks you to link your Slack account, then applies the action you selected. Your later actions apply straight away. Available actions are scoped to the linked user’s permissions. If the user does not have access to the application, a requested action will be denied.

Permissions AppSignal requests

During authorization, the AppSignal Slack app asks for:
  • incoming-webhook — access to the channel you select during authorization.
  • chat:write — post messages and edit them afterwards.
  • chat:write.public — post to a public channel without adding the app to it first.

Migrating an existing notifier

Slack notifiers set up before the current app was released keep sending notifications, but are deprecated and need to be migrated to get incident controls and message updates. On the Notifications page, select Manage next to the notifier. Its page shows a deprecation banner offering Migrate to Modern Slack, which redirects you to Slack to re-authorize. After that:
  • The notifier’s name, apps, notification types, namespace filters, and “enable for new apps” setting carry over.
  • Every metric alert, uptime monitor, heartbeat and process monitor, and log alert that used the notifier is repointed at the new one.
  • The previous notifier is removed.
Reconfiguration of alerts is unnecessary, and notifications should continue to be present even during migration.

Uninstalling

To remove the Slack integration, delete its notifier from the Notifications page in your AppSignal organization. You can also remove the AppSignal app from your Slack workspace in your Slack app management settings.

Integrations list