July 2020 Update: Close alerts in SIGNL4 when the issue was resolved in the backend

Jul 8, 2020 | General, Updates

Our July update brings new features to the email and webhook API’s. You can now close alerts in SIGNL4 when the issue was resolved in your backend system.

Use Case

A typical use case is IT monitoring and auto-recovery. Imagine you get an alert in the middle of the night about an IT issue. A service failed. However, you have configured an automatic recovery mechanism and the server re-starts automatically. After a while the monitoring tool will recognize that the issue is resolved. You can now easily and automatically forward this resolve information to SIGNL4 by email or webhook in order to close the alert in the app. So, when looking at the SIGNL4 app you see the issue has been resolved already by the backend system and you can continue your night sleep.

How does it work?

The new X-S4-Status parameter

Trigger the new alert with this webhook request:

 

{
    “Subject”: “Server Down”,
    “Body”: “Server A2 is down.”,
    “X-S4-ExternalID”: “1234”,
    “X-S4-Status”: “new”
}

 

Now close the alert with this request:

 

{
    “X-S4-ExternalID”: “1234”,
    “X-S4-Status”: “resolved”
}

 

Please note that the parameter “X-S4-ExternalID” must be the same as for the initial request that opened the alert. The parameter “X-S4-Status” must be “resolved” so close the alert.
If the parameter “X-S4-Status” is present and neither “new” nor “resolved” the event gets discarded. This is useful if you would like to ignore updates.
That’s it and it works for email, too:

 

Email Body to open a new alert:
Subject: Server Down
Body: Server A2 is down.
X-S4-ExternalID: 1234
X-S4-Status: new
Email Body to close the alert:
Subject: Server Down
Body: Server A2 is down.
X-S4-ExternalID: 1234
X-S4-Status: resolved

Custom parameters

Sometimes the backend systems are limited and to not allow to modify the alert text. In this case you can define where you find the “External ID” and the “Status” as part of your webhook URL.

In this case there is not need to change any code in your backend system. You just need to adapt the webhook URL.

 

For the webhook URL this looks like this:

https://connect.signl4.com/webhook/<team-secret>?ExtIDParam=Trigger_Id&ExtStatusParam=Trigger_Status&ResolvedStatus=RESOLVED

 

As you can see there are some additional parameters:

ExtIDParam: The name of an unique identifier of your alert.

ExtStatusParam: The name of the status parameter.

ResolvedStatus: The value that indicates that an alert was closed.

NewStatus: Optional value for which to open a new alert. If this is set and the value of ExtStatusParam is neither the one specified in NewStatus nor the one in ResolvedStatus, the event is discarded. This is useful if there are update events you would like to ignore.

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