Posting Provider Events to Slack

The Event Switchboard in ManageIQ/CloudForms exposes provider events to Automate, allowing automation based on any supported events.

In this example, we're posting Slack messages to a Team channel when Kubernetes events are raised.

Slack Webhook

In order to post messages to Slack, we need a webhook and the associated access token (created via a Slack Button).

Ruby Power

For many integrations, the Gem of choice is Rest-Client or Savon but it is worth checking if there is a specific Gem for the system in question. In this case, there is the slack-ruby-client, although it needs to be installed on the appliance, along with its prerequisite Gli Gem.

#gem install slack-ruby-client

Reading the Event Stream

The present event data is contained within the event_stream object and can be read easily, for example:

event_stream = $evm.root['event_stream']
data = event_stream.full_data

p data[:event_type]
p data[:timestamp]
p data[:message]

Posting a Message

Using the slack-ruby-client, configuring the client and posting an event is simple.

Slack::Web::Client.configure do |config|
  config.token = slack_token
end

client = Slack::Web::Client.new

client.chat_postMessage(channel: slack_channel, text: "#{text}", as_user: true)

Here is an example method.

Wire Automate

Finally, we need to call the new method when the event is triggered, for example by updating the schema to invoke it for all events.

Message

Now we can post a message whenever an event of interest is triggered and the resulting message appears in the desired Slack channel.

Other use cases include raising SNMP traps, sending emails or perhaps creating Service Now records.