Slack is the messaging platform we all know and depend on to communicate with our teams.
Integrating Slack into Cortex allows you to:
- Define slack channels for each service
- Use the slack bot to get quick information about services
- Get notifications on upcoming team initiatives and action items
Take a look at our documentation to configure your team’s Slack into Cortex.
Slack Channels for Services
For each service in Cortex, you can assign a Slack channel. The benefit of doing this is that you know exactly where to send a message when you have questions about a service. No more guessing if you’re putting your message in the right place and wondering if it’ll ever be read.
To ensure that each team does this, you can create a Scorecard that checks:
- If a Slack channel is set
- The number of members in a Slack channel
Validating both can help you ensure that there is always a clear channel to message and that the channel hasn’t been abandoned. Using Scorecards is a great way to validate that all teams are following the same standards.
/cortex Slack Bot
The Slack Bot can help you find quick information that you need without needing to open the Cortex app and find what you’re looking for.
To simply search through the catalog of services, you can use the /cortex search <query> using Lucene queries. We’ll return back all the relevant results along with the description, owners, and service groups for each. Clicking on the result will take you to the service homepage.
To quickly get details about a service, you can call the Slack Bot with the service tag. The available commands are:
- /cortex service <service-tag>: Lists service information such as owners, current oncall, links, and timeline events
- /cortex runbooks <service-tag>: List all runbook links
- /cortex docs <service-tag>: List all documentation links
- /cortex logs <service-tag>: List all runbook links
- /cortex oncall <service-tag>: Find current oncall
- /cortex owners <service-tag>: List all owners, along with their emails
- /cortex scores <service-tag>: List all scorecard scores
- /cortex sentry <service-tag>: List recent Sentry issues
- /cortex timeline <service-tag>: List recent timeline events
Team Notifications
With the integration, Cortex also has the ability to send your team various types of notifications. There’s a weekly report that shows you what services are most improved and most deteriorated in the last week as well as any outstanding action items from Initiatives created by your organization. We also have a notification to notify service owners of Initiatives created along with details of the action items they must complete for each service and a reminder a few days before the initiative is due to any owners with outstanding items.
Start using Cortex & Slack today
By using Cortex and Slack together, you’ll always be up to date with the latest org-wide initiatives, be able to get quick information about services within Cortex, and know who to reach out when Cortex doesn’t have what you’re looking for. It’s easy to set up - just take a look at our documentation. If you haven’t started using Cortex yet, set up a demo with our team.
