OpsGenie provides the ability to execute actions directly from OpsGenie apps. In the post “you woke me up. now what?”, I’ve described how this capability can be used to gather additional information and enable alert recipients to assess problems efficiently.
We’ve also released bi-directional integration with Slack, meaning 1) we can forward alert activity to Slack channels, 2) users can interact with alerts, acknowledge, comment, close, etc. directly from Slack.
Combining these two capabilities, OpsGenie allows users to execute custom commands. For example, one can execute commands like ping, or traceroute. Here is how it works:
1. When creating alerts, we can specify the actions that may be relevant to that alert. A network related alerts may have actions like ping and traceroute, an application problem may have an action that gather info from a log file, etc.
2. OpsGenie forwards alert activity, when there is a new alert, or when a note is added to an alert to Slack, hence users can see them in Slack channels.
3. Users can execute the custom action from Slack (/genie commands) thanks to Slack’s support command execution. One of the commands OpsGenie integration supports is the “exec” command that allows executing the custom action.
4. OpsGenie passes the alert and the action executed by the user to the customer systems. Marid utility subscribes to these actions, and can execute the relevant script.
5. Marid collects the output and adds to the alerts as a note, which gets passed to Slack, hence the user can see the output of the command.
Being able to execute the relevant actions directly from the chat room has number of advantages. The steps taken to troubleshoot the problem are visible to users in the chat room as well as anyone who may get alert notifications from OpsGenie and use OpsGenie apps or web UI. If the alert gets escalated, the next person can have full visibility to what has done so far, which can save a lot of time. Ability to make the relevant actions available for the alert allow guiding users to follow common procedures.
Take a look at this short screencast to see how it all comes together.
