How can you test your notifications when your on-call roster starts?

[#1]

Every Opsgenie team has an on-call roster with their team members. As a team member, when you start your on-call week, how can you be sure that your notifications are setup correctly? This is essential as you don't want to miss any calls from a potential high priority alert.

Opsgenie's REST API allows both creating and deleting an alert.

Here is an example of how you can generate a test P1 alert:

curl -X POST https://api.opsgenie.com/v2/alerts \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Authorization: GenieKey $API_KEY" \
  -d \
    "{
      \"message\": \"Notification test\",
      \"alias\": \"notification-test-<random_id>\",
      \"description\":\"Test notification\",
      \"responders\":[
        {\"name\":\"$TEAM_NAME\", \"type\":\"team\"}
      ],
      \"visibleTo\":[
        {\"name\":\"$TEAM_NAME\",\"type\":\"team\"}
      ],
      \"priority\":\"P1\"
     }"

You can place this in a Bamboo plan or any build tool that can schedule this script to run after your on-call roster starts. Eg. run every Monday at 9 AM.

When this build is run, the person on-call on that week would receive a phone call, which confirms the person's notifications are setup correctly.

This method can also be used to ensure your other types of notifications as Slack are working properly every week.

As a best practice, it would be a good idea to clean up this test alert after a few minutes in the same build. So this alert won't come up in any of your reports.

Here is how you can delete the test alert created earlier:

curl -X DELETE "https://api.opsgenie.com/v2/alerts/$id?identifierType=id" \
     -H "Authorization: GenieKey $API_KEY"

 Hope this brings confidence to the person coming into the roster schedule.

[tjohnson]

I would find it very useful if there was test button that could be used to verify a user has their notification information entered correctly.

[Swapna]

Pager Duty has a simple button where you can quickly test all the plumbing is in place.

[John van der Loo]

You can also create an alert from the Alerts page as per the official docs for creating a manual alert.