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Have Slack Tell You When External Services Hiccup
Use a single slash command and have Slack do all the work
At Parallax, we depend on many external services. Some of these services are things that we use internally for development like LaunchDarkly or GitHub. Others are services that our customers depend on for their business like HubSpot.
Did you know many SaaS providers have webpages dedicated to publishing current status of their service(s)? If you’re an engineer, I’m sure you’ve stumbled on to a status page or two trying to figure out why something wasn’t working.
At Parallax, we were tired of having to look for a status page when we thought something might be wrong. We wanted to be able to be proactive. We wanted to be able to have alerts come to us. As opposed to tracking down alerts after we heard something might be wrong.
In order to solve this problem, I was preparing to build an app. It would be a fun little side project. As luck would have it, I didn’t need to. I discovered we could get most of what we wanted by using Slack and a single slash command!
Status Pages
Before we dive into the nuts and bolts, let’s first start with what is a status page?
I mentioned in the introduction that many SaaS providers publish status pages.
GitHub Status
LaunchDarkly Status
HubSpot Status
Status pages follow a similar format. They show current status of major features of their service(s). Some will have another page for incident history or even history of individual components.
Finding a status page, if one exists, is as easy as searching by the provider name and the…
