Demo

Building Network Automations with Slack Integration for Real-Time Communications

Slack is a very popular communications tool for many IT teams. For teams managing large networks, communication between network engineers, network operations, and management is incredibly important for broadcasting changes in network status, coordinating resources, and resolving disruptions. However, communicating detailed information in real-time becomes a secondary function, especially when making changes during a maintenance window or troubleshooting a network problem. This oversight can negatively impact how efficiently network teams manage and address network events.

With Itential, integrating team notification systems like Slack is a simple process and once integrated into the platform, Slack APIs for posting messages to channels can be used in an automation workflow. This workflow can integrate with sources of truth to gather data for a network change, execute the network change, and utilize the same data in a message sent in a Slack channel while the automation is in execution. This can provide detailed information regarding network devices being changed, the nature of the changes, and when the changes begin and are completed. All within a Slack message that is broadcast to network teams, making them aware of the entire process. This alleviates the need for network engineers to manually stop the work they are doing to post an update in Slack so they can focus on getting more work done in less time.In this demo, you will learn how to use the Itential Automation Platform to:

  • Integrate with Slack using APIs.
  • Understand the Slack API calls for communication.
  • Create a network change automation.
  • Transform data for use by the Slack API.
  • Post network change details in a Slack channel.

Demo Notes

(So you can skip ahead, if you want.)

04:21 Creating a New App in Slack
09:11 Integrating Slack with Itential
13:09 Using Slack API to Post Messages
17:39 Building a Data Transformation to Post API
21:27 Run Automation & Verify Results
25:11 Adding Slack Notifications into Network Automations
33:15 Automating a ServiceNow Change Request & Creating a Dynamic Link
38:54 Run Change Request Automation & Verify Results