At Hogwarts, everyone loved using the Owl’s postal service as it was effective for all kinds of communications. In today’s world, one of the efficient means for formal communication is Slack. 

Don’t take my word for it. According to the recent survey, Slack has 18 million daily active users and 156,000 organizations use the app.

Slack provides better communication, collaboration, and decision making for teams with calls and messaging. For more advanced functionality, users can integrate Slack with other apps to automate tasks right from the comfort of their mobile phones. 

Automating tasks could mean triggering actions from slack, getting informed via instant notifications on a task, and more. There are over 2,000 apps on the Slack App Directory, catering to various needs. One such category is DevOps, where a lot of hustle over deployment activity happens. Slack when interacting with DevOps tools help in automating workflows/pipelines, and keeps teams informed on relevant channels about the deployment progress.

A few more advantages of using Slack for DevOps processes are:

• Gives real-time communication updates for instant vital announcements.
• Slack serves as a hub for developers to collaborate and respond appropriately to notifications.
• Activities like finished pipelines and awaiting approvals can all have notifications set up for them. 
• Workspace transparency can be promoted by providing all required stakeholders with direct Slack notification access.
• Response time is faster than email communication, as users don't notice the emails or view them late.

Opsera and Slack Integration

Opsera has a native integration built with Slack that can be setup with a single click. The DevOps engineers can directly go to the Opsera platform to set up the Slack tool under Tool Registry.

Likewise, the specific Slack channel must have integration with the Opsera app using the marketplace.

When the connection is secure, you can set up the necessary actions to be performed.

Get Alerts on Pipeline Step Status

You can create a workflow to alert users via Slack about the status of a Pipeline step’s execution. For example, a Pipeline step could fail and cause a pause in the rest of the workflow. When notified of such failures in the channel, users can resolve it quicker and take actions on the Pipeline.

For this, users need to set up a notification alert specifying the integrated slack tool, and the Slack channel. The notification levels supported are All Activity, Error and Step Completion.

Approve CI/CD Pipeline in a single click

A key DevOps functionality is executing a Pipeline. Irrespective of whether the Pipeline is triggered manually or automatically (using webhooks, etc) it could involve multiple approval gate steps in between. 

Approval gates require manual approval confirmation from a user. This decision is important and time-sensitive, and it would be frustrating if we make it slip through the cracks.

The approval notification can be sent to your slack instantly when the approval is needed. Users can review the pipeline details and the step you are approving and then choose to approve or deny it. Take a look at the below screen on how Opsera sends an instant notification to Slack asking for an approval action from the user. 

When approved from here, the pipeline execution will be resumed. Now, how convenient and foolproof is that?

Slack is a great resource for DevOps engineers to join a community of like-minded individuals. Numerous Slack groups can exist across a variety of topics and actions to  perform. 

Intrigued about Opsera’s other integrations? Check out our Integrations, or write to us and we can chat more!