Hear about alerts and approvals in email, Telegram, Slack, Teams and Discord

A notification is a message Slen sends to people when an alert opens, becomes critical or is resolved, and when an execution waits for an approval or the approval is decided. This page is about the two notification pages of the console: the channels and routes of the team, and your own notifications.

Where the notifications are

Open Settings. Two of its cards lead to the notifications.

• Notifications is the page of the team. Its tabs are Channels (the chats of the team in Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord and Telegram), Routes, which decide who hears about what, and Log, the deliveries of the organization.

• My notifications is your page: your email and your Telegram, what Slen sends you in this organization, your quiet hours and, on a tab of its own, the history of what it sent you.

How a notification finds its way

Slen tells people about five events:

• an alert opened;

• an open alert became critical, once for each alert;

• an alert was resolved;

• an execution waits for an approval;

• the approval was decided, or its time ran out.

Two kinds of channel carry the messages.

• A channel of the team is a channel in Slack, Microsoft Teams or Discord, or a group in Telegram. It belongs to the organization, not to the person who connected it, and it hears the whole organization or one project.

• A personal channel is your email or your own chat with the bot of Slen in Telegram. It belongs to you and serves every organization you are a member of.

Two things decide who gets a message.

• A route of the organization names the events and the recipients: channels of the team, roles and members. An owner or an admin writes it.

• A subscription is yours: the events you want and the personal channels they go to. Only you change your subscriptions.

An event reaches each channel once, however many routes and subscriptions name it.

Connect a channel of the team

The address of a webhook is a secret: whoever has it can write to the channel. Slen stores it encrypted and never returns it. The row of the channel shows the host of the address and its last four characters.

Slack

Slack gives the address through an app you create in your own workspace. Slen has no app in Slack to install.

1. Open Slack apps, create a new app from scratch and choose your workspace.

2. In the settings of the app open Incoming Webhooks and turn them on.

3. Add a new webhook to the workspace and choose the channel it posts to.

4. Copy the address of the webhook. It starts with https://hooks.slack.com/services/.

A message in Slack has no buttons. Its link opens the alert or the approval in the console.

Microsoft Teams

Teams takes the messages through a workflow of the channel. The connectors of Office 365, the incoming webhooks Teams had before, are retired, and Slen does not take their addresses.

1. In Teams open the menu of the channel and choose Workflows.

2. Choose the template that posts to a channel when a webhook request is received.

3. Choose the team and the channel, and save the workflow.

4. Copy the address the workflow shows. It is an address of Azure Logic Apps or Power Automate with /workflows/ in its path, and it carries a signature.

Discord

1. Open the settings of the server, then Integrations, then Webhooks.

2. Create a new webhook and choose the channel it posts to.

3. Copy the address of the webhook. It starts with https://discord.com/api/webhooks/.

A Telegram group

A group is connected with the bot of Slen instead of an address.

1. In the form of a new channel choose a Telegram group and get a link. The link works for 15 minutes by default. When it runs out before a group takes it, get a new one in the form: the channel is made anew.

2. Open the link, or scan its QR code. Telegram offers to choose a group and adds the bot of Slen to it.

3. Let the bot post in the group.

4. Come back to the console. The form shows the name of the group that connected. Press Confirm when it is your group. When it is another one, say so in the form: the bot leaves that group, and you get a new link.

Only the person who got the link confirms the group. A link that reached somebody else does not make their group a recipient of your organization. A group serves one channel of Slen at a time. In the group the bot reads only the commands sent to it, not the conversation.

Routes

A route says which events go to whom. On the Routes tab press New route and fill in the form.

• The events: alerts, when one opens and when it becomes critical, and approval requests. For alerts you may tick some of the types and choose one rule.

• The level: from Warning or from Critical. An approval request counts as a warning.

• The closings: whether the resolution of an alert and the decision of an approval go where the first message went. This is on by default.

• The project: all projects or one of them. All projects is offered only to a member who reaches every project.

• The recipients: channels of the team, roles and members.

A role is read when an event comes: whoever has the role at that moment gets the message, a member who joined after the route was written too. A member gets the message on the personal channels where they receive what is assigned to them, and a member with no such channel turned on gets nothing — the row of the route says so. A recipient gets only the events its role reads in the console. Viewer is not offered when the route carries approvals: a viewer does not see approvals.

Who to notify about one rule

The drawer of an alert rule, on the Rules tab of Alerts, has the block Who to notify. Add channels of the team, roles or members to it, and the alerts of that rule reach them.

• The block keeps a route bound to the rule. It carries the opening of an alert of the rule, its turn to critical and its resolution, in the project of the rule. The first recipient creates the route, and removing the last one deletes it. The route is listed on the Routes tab too.

• A new rule gets its route as soon as the rule is created.

• Without management:write the block is read-only, and so it is for a rule of the whole organization when you do not reach every project.

• The people who subscribed to such alerts themselves get them as well.

Your own notifications

On My notifications you choose what reaches you. Nobody else changes it, not even an owner.

Your channels

• Email goes to the address of your account. There is nothing to connect, and nothing is sent until the address is confirmed.

• To get messages in Telegram, turn on its switch or choose Connect Telegram in its menu, open the link or scan its QR code, and start the chat with the bot. Come back to the console, check that it names your chat, and press Confirm. When the link runs out first, get a new one. A Telegram account serves one account of Slen. Send /stop to the bot to pause the chat.

• Each channel has a switch that pauses it and turns it back on. The menu of the channel sends a test message, which is put in the queue, and the history of your deliveries shows how it went. A test email goes at most once a minute.

• The menu of each of your channels has a box that takes what administrators assign to you, and it is ticked by default. A route that names you or your role reaches you only on the channels where the box is ticked. Your own subscriptions do not depend on it.

What to send

A subscription names the events (alerts of the types you choose, approval requests), the level from which they reach you, the project and the channels they go to. A subscription to all your projects follows your access: a project you are given later is in it at once. Approvals are not offered to a Viewer.

When you join an organization, and when your role changes, Slen gives you the subscriptions recommended for the role.

A subscription you changed is yours, and a change of role does not touch it: the role replaces only the recommendations you left as they were. A link under the list puts back the subscriptions recommended for your role. A subscription your role no longer reads, or one to a project you no longer reach, stays in the list struck through, and works again when the access comes back.

Quiet hours

Quiet hours hold the messages to your personal channels for the hours you choose, in the time zone you choose — the time zone of the organization by default. The hours may cross midnight. When they end, the messages that waited come as one digest. By default a critical message still comes through at once. The switch of quiet hours turns them on and off, and their menu changes the hours, the time zone and whether a critical message comes through at once. Quiet hours are yours in every organization you are a member of. The channels of the team have no quiet hours.

What arrives and when

• An event is one message in each channel. A person with email and Telegram gets one message in each.

• When more than five messages go to one channel within five minutes (both numbers are the defaults), the first five go at once. The rest come at the end of the five minutes as one digest: up to ten lines and a link to the feed.

• The resolution of an alert and the decision of an approval go only where the first message went, and only when the route or the subscription reports the closings.

• An alert that becomes critical is reported once. Whoever heard of its opening hears of it as a continuation, and a route or a subscription from Critical gets it as its first message. An alert someone acknowledged is reported too, with the name of who acknowledged it.

• An alert that opened and was resolved while its message still waited, for a digest or for the end of quiet hours, comes in the digest as one line — opened and closed, and how long it lasted — and no message about its closing follows.

• A message to a personal channel is in the language of your account and in your time zone. A message to a channel of the team is in the language of the channel and in the time zone of the organization.

• The link in a message opens the console in the organization and the project of the event.

• Every notification email has a link to unsubscribe. One click pauses the notification emails to your address in every organization; the emails to sign in and the invitations still come. Turn the emails back on in My notifications.

• A notification email says at its foot why it came: you subscribed to it, a route of the team assigned it to you, or it continues a message you got before. It does not name the route.

• Slen sends a limited number of notification emails a day to a person and to an organization. An email past the limit is skipped, and the log says so.

Roles and projects

• An Owner or an Admin, signed in as a person, connects the channels of the team and writes the routes.

• A channel or a route of the whole organization needs access to every project, which an owner and an admin have.

• A Developer and a Finance member see the channels, the routes and the log and change none of them. A Viewer does not open the page of the team.

• Each person sets their own channels, subscriptions and quiet hours, whatever the role.

• A message never tells anyone about a project outside their access, or about an event their role does not read in the console: a viewer hears of no approval. Slen checks it when it routes an event and again right before it sends a message.

• A member who leaves the organization is taken out of its routes, and their subscriptions in it are removed. A route left with no recipient is deleted. The channels they connected stay with the organization.

The log

The Log tab lists the deliveries of the organization for the last 30 days: when, which event, where to, the status and the number of attempts. A personal channel of another person is shown by the name of the person and the kind of the channel, without the address. The log shows only the events of the projects you reach and the events of no project. The history tab of My notifications lists the deliveries to you, with the same filters by status and by channel as the log.

The status says what became of a message: delivered, queued, held until a time, put into a digest, failed with its error, or skipped with the reason — the person is no longer a member, say, or the project has left their access.

A channel was disabled

Slen disables a channel after five failed deliveries in a row. It does so at once when the service says the address is gone: the webhook was deleted, the channel was archived, the bot was removed from the group or blocked. The row of the channel says why. Slen tells the person who connected the channel, while they are an owner or an admin, and the owners of the organization. A personal Telegram that was disabled is reported by email.

• Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord: create a new webhook in the service and put its address into the channel, which switches it back on. Then press Send test.

• Telegram: unblock the bot, or add it back to the group, and connect your chat or the group again.

Notifications and webhooks

A webhook is for your systems: a signed JSON request about every event it is subscribed to, sent again until your service takes it. A notification is for people: a few events in the words of the language of the reader, gathered into digests, with quiet hours and a link to unsubscribe. The two do not depend on each other, and an alert reaches the webhooks and the notifications alike.

Where to go next

• Alerts — the rules whose alerts the notifications report.

• Approvals — the decisions an approval request waits for.

• Members and invitations — the roles and the projects a member reaches.

• Webhooks — send the events of Slen to your service.