How to Receive Cloud Outage Alerts in Microsoft Teams
The Impact of Cloud Outages on Your Business
Cloud outages like the recent ones at Cloudflare, Microsoft Azure, and AWS can have a significant impact on your business with downtime, lost revenue, and unhappy customers. They can also disrupt your team's ability to work effectively. To stay on top of such outages, your team needs to know about them in an easy and timely way.
In this article, we will see how to integrate IncidentHub cloud outage alerts with Microsoft Teams.
- The Impact of Cloud Outages on Your Business
- How Does IncidentHub Work?
- Configuring IncidentHub to Send Alerts to Microsoft Teams
- Conclusion
How Does IncidentHub Work?
IncidentHub is a cloud-based status page aggregator service that monitors the availability of your third-party cloud services by checking public status pages. It this by using a combination of API calls, webhooks, RSS feeds, and other methods.
Outage detection is automatic and happens in real-time. Users can choose to receive notifications for specific services in a tool of their choice which includes Email, Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty etc. It can easily integrate with Microsoft Teams to send alerts to your team's channel.
Configuring IncidentHub to Send Alerts to Microsoft Teams
Once you have created an IncidentHub account you can choose the cloud services you want to monitor. This is covered in detail in the IncidentHub documentation. Next, we need to integrate IncidentHub with your Microsoft Teams channel so that it can send the notifications there.
Adding an integration for Microsoft Teams
IncidentHub integrates with Microsoft Teams using Workflows. Let's do this step by step.
Creating a Workflow in Microsoft Teams
→ Login to your Microsoft account and click on "Teams and channels" on the left sidebar in the Microsoft Teams app.
→ Click on the 3 dots (...) next to the channel you wish to receive notifications in.
→ Click on "Workflows" in the menu.
→ In the popup window, search for "webhook" and choose the template "Send webhook alerts to a channel".
→ Put a descriptive name for the workflow.
→ Confirm the Team and the Channel name.
→ Click on Add workflow.
→ Copy the HTTPS URL on the next screen. You will use it in the next steps.
Connecting IncidentHub With the Workflow
→ Login to your IncidentHub account and click on Channels -> Add -> Microsoft Teams.
→ Add a Name and and a Description.
→ Under "Microsoft Teams Workflow URL", paste the URL that you had copied earlier.
→ To ensure the URL is valid and IncidentHub is able to connect to it, you can click on "Send a test message". This will send a test notification to your Microsoft Teams channel.
→ Click on "Save".
Fine-tuning Your Alerts
To reduce alert noise, fine-tune them by choosing only relevant alerts. You can do this by:
- Choosing specific components to monitor.
- Choosing specific types of alerts to receive - outages, maintenances, or both. Services like Twilio, Cloudflare, and Salesforce have a ton of maintenance events and they can easily overwhelm your alert notifications.
- Select the lifecycle events that you are interested in - beginning, end, or all updates.
These topics are explained in detail in the IncidentHub documentation.
Understanding the Alerts
A Microsoft Teams notification sent by IncidentHub looks like this:
The alert is sent as an AdaptiveCard and summarizes all the important information about the outage/maintenance. The colored bar on the left indicates the type of event.
Outage triggered or updated
Outage resolved or maintenance completed
Maintenance ongoing
Upcoming maintenance reminder
Conclusion
IncidentHub's integration with Microsoft Teams is a powerful way to stay informed about cloud outages and maintenance events. It's easy to set up and can be customized to send only the relevant alerts to your team's channel. Try it out.
IncidentHub is not affiliated with any of the services and vendors mentioned in this article. All logos and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders
This article was first published on the IncidentHub blog.