On December 1, made the decision to acquire the industry-leading business communication platform, , in order to combine functionality with the Salesforce Customer 360 software product. Heroku, a cloud-based platform as a service (PaaS) offering, has been a Salesforce product since being purchased ten years ago, nearly to the day. Salesforce Slack As a result of this announcement, I thought it would be fun to demonstrate how to integrate Slack with three Heroku add-ons. For this article, the following products will be utilized: Activity To Go Coralogix Logging RollBar My goal is to demonstrate how Slack—a tool already used for intra-team communication—can also be the target for application status updates, logging, and unexpected issues. Activity To Go keeps your team notified of all Heroku app changes and integrates quickly and easily with Slack. In fact, of all the integrations performed in this exercise, Activity To Go is by far the easiest to implement. Activity To Go Installing the Activity To Go add-on can be done using the Heroku user interface or the following command: heroku addons:create activitytogo:free Once installed, the Activity To Go dashboard is available via the Heroku user interface: Once launched, the Dashboard appears as shown below: Connecting to Slack For the purposes of this example, Activity To Go will be used to send alerts any time the Heroku Dyno changes. The use case here is to alert the feature team when changes are being pushed to Heroku. In order to accomplish this, the button is used from the Activity To Go dashboard. That opens a new subscription form: Add subscription For the purposes of this example, I named my subscription and selected the and options. Next, click the button for "Send a Slack message." Service Alerts Release App Configure This pops up a modal to allow access to Slack: From here, select the Slack channel and choose the button. service-alerts Allow The modal is displayed so the settings can be confirmed: Configure Slack action Upon pressing the button, you are ready to save the new subscription: Done Once saved, the Activity To Go Dashboard is updated: Coralogix Logging provides logging which is integrated with Heroku's existing status levels. Coralogix Logging Adding the Coralogix Logging add-on can be completed using the Heroku user interface or the following command: heroku addons:create coralogix:free mbday -30 Once installed, the Coralogix dashboard can be displayed from the Heroku user interface: Connecting to Slack In order to connect to Slack, enter the within the Coralogix dashboard. Next, select the option and select the option (use the plus icon on the right side of the screen). Provide an alias as shown below and make sure to select the option. Settings Webhooks Add new webhook Slack With the Slack instance open, launch the following URL: Create a new Slack Webhook Select the channel you wish to use (or create a new one) and single-click the button: Add Incoming Webhooks Integration If the page does not automatically refresh, refresh it yourself and note the value. Webhook URL Copy and paste the value in the Coralogix webhook form. To validate, single-click the button. A message similar to what is displayed below should appear in the Slack instance: Test Configuration At this point, Coralogix is now integrated with the specified Slack channel. Configuring Alerts With Coralogix ready for use, I decided to create two custom alerts: Activity alert Out of bounds error alert Activity Alert Within the section of the Coralogix dashboard, I made a new alert with the following attributes to track activity for the API: Alerts Out of Bounds Error Alert Within the section of the Coralogix dashboard, I created this new alert with the following attributes to track when the out of bounds exception occurs: Alerts Adding Rollbar provides a different approach to application monitoring. It's not only focused on agile development and continuous delivery, but on providing real-time visibility into your application without having to refresh cluttered log screens and mine mountains of data. Furthermore, the data that arrives into the Rollbar dashboard links to the underlying source code—even to the point where existing tickets can be linked to an unexpected event, or a new ticket can be created directly from Rollbar itself. Rollbar To install the Rollbar add-on, use the Heroku user interface or the following command: heroku addons:create rollbar:free The pom.xml file has already been updated in this repository to include the following dependency: <dependency> <artifactId>rollbar-spring-boot-webmvc< version> com.rollbar < > groupId </ > groupId /artifactId>
    <version>1.7.4</ </ > dependency Next, the application.yml file was updated to include the following settings: rollbar:
  access-token: ${ROLLBAR_ACCESS_TOKEN}
  branch: master
  environment: ${ROLLBAR_ENVIRONMENT}
  code-version: ${HEROKU_RELEASE_VERSION}
spring:
  application:
    name: heroku-slack Finally, sending information to Rollbar can be as easy as this example from the RollbarEvents: @RequiredArgsConstructor
@Slf4j
@Component
public {
    private final Environment environment;
    private final RollbarConfigurationProperties rollbarConfigurationProperties;
    private final Rollbar rollbar;

    @PostConstruct
    public postConstruct() {
        log.info( ,
                environment.getProperty( ),
                environment.getProperty( ),
                SecurityUtils.maskCredentialsRevealPrefix(rollbarConfigurationProperties.getAccessToken(), , ),
                rollbarConfigurationProperties.getEnvironment());
        rollbar.info( .format( ,
                environment.getProperty( ),
                environment.getProperty( ),
                SecurityUtils.maskCredentialsRevealPrefix(rollbarConfigurationProperties.getAccessToken(), , ),
                rollbarConfigurationProperties.getEnvironment()));
    }
} class RollbarEvents void "Started {} on port #{} using Rollbar accessToken={} ({})" "spring.application.name" "server.port" 5 '*' String "Started %s on port #%s using Rollbar accessToken=%s (%s)" "spring.application.name" "server.port" 5 '*' The following configuration items were set up in the Heroku instance for use by Rollbar: Connecting to Slack In order to connect to Slack, use the menu from the Rollbar application (launched from Heroku). Once the Rollbar project is selected, navigate to the | option. Simply single-click the icon in the list of . Settings Integrations Notifications Slack Available Channels After selecting my existing access token, I selected the channel and left all other defaults in place. #application-errors Pushing the button will send a test message to Slack. Navigating to Slack and the channel show the following test message: Send Test Notification #application-errors Our Example - A Simple RESTful Application Now let's see all three products in action. We'll create a simple RESTful application (integrated with all of these products), execute a few actions to trigger messages (deploy a new release, make config changes, make a request), and see how these integrations look in practice. For the example, we'll use a Heroku Dyno containing a simple RESTful API using Spring Boot, called heroku-slack which can be found at the following URL: https://gitlab.com/johnjvester/heroku-slack The heroku-slack service returns the Artist object in all available URIs. The object is quite simple and is displayed below: @AllArgsConstructor
@NoArgsConstructor
@Data
public {
    private name;
} class Artist String Please review the heroku-slack repository for additional information on this RESTful service. Interacting With Slack Now that everything is set up and configured, we can demonstrate how the simple Spring Boot service running in Heroku can integrate with Slack. Deploying a New Release Giving feature team members the ability to see when the application is deployed to a Heroku Dyno has a number of benefits. With the add-on in place, the following message will appear in the Slack channel: Activity To Go #service-alerts Heroku Dyno Configuration Changes The add-on will also post a message in the Slack channel when system variables change in the Heroku instance: Activity To Go #service-alerts Making a Simple Request In this simple repository, using the GET /artists URI returns a list of hard-coded artists. is configured to publish the following Slack message in the channel: Coralogix Logging #coralogix Generating a Bad Request When a bad request is created—in this case by requesting an Artist for a position value which does not exist—both the and add-on products provide information to Slack. Coralogix Logging Rollbar Trigging off the ERROR alert, posts the following message in the channel in Slack: Coralogix Logging #coralogix Based upon the Java code updates and the GlobalControllerExceptionHandler, posts the following message in the channel in Slack: Rollbar #application-errors The product provides additional value in its ability to assign the error to a configured team member, directly from the Slack instance: Rollbar Please note that the error level can also be updated directly from Slack. Summary Information Both and provide additional information from their user interfaces. Coralogix Logging Rollbar The alert summary provides a nice break-down of all the alerts that have been captured: Coralogix Logging provides a high-level dashboard as well: Coralogix Logging provides an advanced dashboard which can even link directly to the source code: Rollbar The view provides a high-level summary of each error as well: Items Conclusion With a very low investment in both time and effort, an existing Heroku Dyno can be integrated with Slack. Feature team members and DevOps engineers can easily keep up-to-date with the application or service simply by logging into the specified Slack workspace. In the end, the project in Heroku contains the following add-ons. As you can see, for this demonstration, none of the employed items will carry a monthly cost for use: This article focused on three add-ons currently available in the Heroku catalog. Using a keyword search of "slack" provided a list of twenty options ready for use with the Slack program. Of course, more options likely exist via standard webhook connectivity. Heroku was designed to help developers focus on meeting the business needs of their application. Integrating with Slack is another example of how feature teams can remain focused while keeping a pulse on their dynos running in Heroku. After all, many feature teams are likely already using Slack. If you are interested in the source code for this article, please review the following repository on GitLab: https://gitlab.com/johnjvester/heroku-slack Have a really great day!

Heroku

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How To Connect Heroku Server with Slack

How To Connect Heroku Server with Slack

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