How can I use the slack app and set a channel to send all notifications for a specific component to?

Question

I have many components but in this case I want a component to send all its updates to a slack channel. Let's call that component x.

I also have the slack app enabled and I have a slack channel called #component-x-updates.

In the option, it says "What do you want to receive notifications about?" so I drill into the components and select component x, because that is the component i want to receive notifications about.

Now, I want to create a maintenance. So I do. I expect that the maintenance that I scheduled in status page will show up in #component-x-updates. But it does not. Instead statuspage only shows the maintenance in the slack channel when the maintenance begins. This fails the purpose of letting my users know I have a maintenance window going on.

Jesse Klein · Answer

HI Joshua,

I totally understand that you wouldn't want to have every maintenance created. It would be nice to be able to narrow that down further.

I would be happy to bring this forward to the product team to take a look as a feature request. I can't guarantee that this would change anytime soon, however, they will definitely take a look and come up with a solution. Thanks for the suggestion. If you have any other questions, please feel free to open a ticket with us and we would be happy to help!

Regards,

Jesse

Joshua Inoa · Answer

Hi Jesse, my concern with turning on scheduled maintenances is that it will pull every  maintenance created to the specific slack channel. I would love to have that at least be optional to pick specific components. This way a specific slack channel associated with the component gets updated any time a maintenance for that component is created. As of right now, unrelated maintenances will go to the slack channel for that component and that starts to become a big message blob that people begin ignoring since its not relevant to the component they joined the slack channel for. Is there a way to ask for this feature?

The enable slack subscriptions option is only for public status pages and ours is internal and we don't have plans of making it public.

Jesse Klein · Answer

Hello Joshua,

Thanks for the question around the Slack App functionality. This tool in particular is meant to take your Activity Log and dump whatever is in there into a channel (or whatever you configured). It can be super useful when you want updates sent to Slack for your team.

When you schedule a scheduled maintenance, the Activity Log will show this information, however, it does not mention anything about the components since the components have not changed. Since this information does not show up in the Activity Log until the maintenance starts, you will not see it populate within Slack. Furthermore, since you only have components showing, you will only gain information about changes to the components when they happen.

What you might consider is turning on the scheduled maintenances. This would pull every Activity Log related to a scheduled maintenance but that would get your desired effect of seeing the maintenance before it started.

Unfortunately, this tool was meant more for teams trying to keep track of the changes done by other team members without having to login to Statuspage and not really as a tool to notify users. For that, we have the Slack subscriptions: https://support.atlassian.com/statuspage/docs/enable-slack-subscriptions/

I hope that you have a nice day!

Jesse