Email integration, even easier and more powerful

<p>It is safe to say that monitoring tools and services universally support sending email alerts. Hence not surprisingly, creating alerts in OpsGenie via email is the most common integration method used by OpsGenie users. Based on on the feedback we&#8217;ve received from OpsGenie users, we&#8217;ve enhanced email integration capabilities to make it both easier and more flexible. <strong>Closing alerts automatically via email</strong> Although it has always been possible to <a href="http://support.opsgenie.com/customer/portal/articles/565170-create-alerts-via-the-web-api">create and close alerts via the API</a>, until recently email integration only allowed <a href="http://support.opsgenie.com/customer/portal/articles/757537-creating-alerts-via-email">creating alerts</a> but not closing them. As a result, many OpsGenie users that rely on email integration have been creating multiple alerts in OpsGenie for the same problem: one when the problem is detected (i.e. host down alert), and another when the problem is resolved (i.e host up alert). It is now possible to create an <a href="http://support.opsgenie.com/customer/portal/articles/1014173-automatically-closing-alerts-with-emails">email rule to close alerts automatically</a> as well. This should reduce the number of alerts for these users, and make it easier to manage the alerts. <strong>Getting notified when an alert is closed</strong> Many OpsGenie users have also asked for the ability to <a href="http://support.opsgenie.com/customer/portal/articles/1025555-close-alert-notifications">receive a notification when an alert gets closed</a>as well. Yet our inquiries indicated that not everyone cares to receive another notification alerts get closed. And other users have indicated that they would like to receive notifications for only a subset of alerts and not for all of them. As a result, in order to accommodate these requirements, we&#8217;ve added this capability and provided controls around them to minimize notification noise.</p><ul><li>We&#8217;ve added an optional field called &#8220;notify&#8221; to the close alert method of the alert API. Notify field can be used to specify who should be notified when the alert gets closed. Notify field can be set to &#8220;recipients&#8221;, meaning notify the same users who were notified when the alert is created, or can specify user or group as subset of users who can receive close alert notifications</li><li>We&#8217;ve enhanced user controls to empower each user to specify whether or not to receive close alert notifications. Users can also specify how to receive these notifications, via email, SMS, or Apple/Google push notifications.</li></ul><p><strong>Custom email addresses per email rule</strong> Each customer is automatically assigned a default email address that OpsGenie users can use to forward emails from monitoring systems and create/close alerts in OpsGenie. Thanks to email rules string matching capabilities, it is possible to configure how OpsGenie should process each incoming email, whether to create or close an alert, who should the recipients be etc. We&#8217;ve just added the capability to <a href="http://support.opsgenie.com/customer/portal/articles/1025618-custom-email-addresses">assign a custom email address</a> for each email rule. We think the ability to assign custom email addresses will make defining and testing email rules easier. For example, OpsGenie users can assign different email addresses for different monitoring tools, etc. We have still more enhancements to come to improve both usability and functionality of email rules, so stay tuned :) <a href="http://twitter.com/berkay">@berkay</a></p>