Add a Slack alert to our alert channel

Overview

This document will serve as a guide on how to add an alert to our Slack alerts channel below:

• #operations-engineering-alerts

There are three types of alerts at time of writing:

• RSS Feed - third party tools usually offer an RSS feed we can subscribe to which will alert us if they are having issues
• Pingdom - end point checking, Pingdom will simply ping an end point every X seconds and report if it responds with bad return code
• GitHub Actions - a snippet of code we add at the end of certain GitHub Action files to report to us when they fail.

RSS Feeds

Requirements

• The RSS feed - this can be retrieved from the third party tools website, an example is the Get Updates button on this page
• Access to the Slack RSS application from MoJ (https://mojdt.slack.com/services/B642DDZG9)

Adding a feed

1. Navigate to the bottom of the Slack RSS application
2. Copy the feed address (Atom/RSS both work) into the “Feed URL” field
3. Select #operations-engineering-alerts in the “Post to Channel” field
4. Select “Subscribe to feed”

Once this has been done, every time the selected feed reports an issue, it will let us know on Slack.

Pingdom

Requirements

• Access to the Operations Engineering tools account (it’s in LastPass)
• The end point you wish monitor

Adding a Pingdom alert

1. Navigate to the Uptime section on Pingdom
2. Select “Add new” at the top left of the page
3. Enter a relevant name for the “Name of check” field - (We usually go with the application name)
4. Enter the end point you wish to monitor to the “URL/IP” field
5. Ensure “http/https” is selected correctly
6. Select “Europe” for the “Test from” field
7. Add “operationsengineering” to the “Tags” field
8. Add any other relevant tags to the “Tags” field - example “decomission” would be relevant for Operations Engineering Decomission Pages end points
9. Select the option you want for “Check importance” - we usually go with Low
10. Untick “MoJ Digital” on “Who to alert?”
11. Tick “Operations Engineering Alerts” in the “Connect Integrations” section
12. Ensure the test is working with the “Test check” button
13. Select “Create check”

Once this has been done, every time the selected end point is down, it will let us know on Slack.

GitHub Actions

Requirements

• SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL secret configured on target repository (secure notes in LastPass)
• Access to push to target repository

Adding GitHub Actions alert

1. Clone the repository containing the GitHub action file you want to add the alert to
2. Open the GitHub action/workflow file

3. As the last step of the action, add the following code:

         - name: Report failure to Slack
           if: always()
           uses: ravsamhq/notify-slack-action@v1
           with:
               status: ${{ job.status }}
               notify_when: 'failure'
               notification_title: 'Failed GitHub Action Run'
           env:
               SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL: ${{ secrets.SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL }}
   

4. An example of a complete workflow with this step is here

5. Pull request this change into main

Once this has been done, every time the selected GitHub Action fails, it will let us know on Slack.

This page was last reviewed on 8 October 2024. It needs to be reviewed again on 8 January 2025 by the page owner #operations-engineering-alerts .