The idea seems good: send backup reports to a Slack or Microsoft Teams channel, where the team spends its day. A week later, the channel gets a hundred messages a day, almost all of them successes, and the team has muted it. The flooded-inbox problem has simply moved.
Alert on changes of state
A useful alert answers the question “do I need to do something?”. The events that justify one:
- a new problem: a backup fails, or an expected report doesn’t arrive;
- a worsening: a known problem changes nature (new cause, another task affected);
- a recovery: the backup works again, the incident can be closed;
- a reminder: a problem is still open after a set delay.
The daily success of a healthy backup is not an alert. It should be recorded, not announced.
A short, useful message
A good alert fits in a few lines: the client, the task, the state, the date, and a link to the details. There is no need to paste the full log into the channel, quite the opposite: reports can contain machine or user names that have no business circulating in a chat tool.
One channel per purpose
- a “backup incidents” channel for the technical team;
- possibly one channel per large client or per on-call team;
- no “all reports” channel.
Webhook security
Slack incoming webhooks and Teams Workflows URLs are secret addresses: anyone who knows them can post in the channel. Store them like passwords, and disable the ones you no longer use.
A good alert is rare, short and actionable. If the team wants to mute the channel, there are too many alerts.
With Soluax
Soluax posts to Slack or Teams (from the Starter plan) only the events you choose: new problem, new occurrences, recovery, reminder. Each alert contains the title, the client, the task, the state and a link to the dashboard, never the content of the reports. The webhook address is encrypted and no longer displayed once saved.
See how reports are read with the free analyzer.