Notify Channel With Custom Message

FireHydrant offers a variety of channel notification steps. You can use a standard, templated notification or customize the message. This page covers customized notifications. For Standard Template notifications, see Notify Chat Channel.

Prerequisites

For the notify steps to work in Slack, you need to invite the FireHydrant bot to the channels you want to notify. You should only have to do this once for each new channel you want to post notifications to.

The FireHydrant bot is included automatically in the incident channels it creates via Runbooks.

Usage

1. In the Runbook edit screen, click on '+ Add Step'.
2. Search for 'Notify', and under your respective ChatOps provider, select either the Notify channel with a custom message or Notify incident channel with a custom message step.
3. Give the step a clear name, and then in the "Comma Separated Channels" box, specify the channel names separated by comma. If you're notifying the incident channel, skip this step.
   • Slack requires the channel names with the # prefix, while MS Teams does not.
4. In the "Your message" box, specify the content. See the sections below for what content is supported.
5. (Optional) Specify conditions for when notification should occur. The default is automatically when incident starts.

Customizing Your Message

For MS Teams, this field supports standard markdown. Slack uses a markup language called mrkdwn which is similar to markdown but is not exactly the same.

These fields also support Liquid templating for both ChatOps providers. This allows immense flexibility in terms of what information is displayed and how it's displayed in the custom message.

For recipes and examples of what you can do, visit the Cookbook section of the template variables docs.

Note: There is a 3,000 character limit for messages posted to Slack. MS Teams has an approximate limit of 28 KB per message.

Adding action buttons

Note: This is only available in the Notify incident channel with a custom message step for Slack.

This step can also include buttons to take certain FireHydrant actions. For example, you can remind your team on a recurring basis to post an update and conveniently include that button.