Overview
Receive and act on alerts, raise new ones, and look up who is on call â from Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Google Chat.
ChatOps handles alerts where your team already talks. Alerts are published into channels you already have, responders accept, reroute, and resolve them there without opening ilert, and colleagues who have no ilert account can still raise an alert from a channel they already use.
What you can do
ilert integrates with Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Google Chat. All three support the same four things:
Receive and respond to alerts
Alerts arrive in the channel as cards showing status, priority, escalation policy, and responders, with buttons to accept, reroute, and resolve. The card is updated in place as the alert changes, so the channel reflects the current state rather than a growing pile of notifications.
Each platform offers two routes, and they are not equivalent:
Buttons on the card
Yes
No
Card updated in place
Yes
No â every event is a new message
Slash commands or @ilert
Yes
No
Needs an admin to connect the workspace
Yes
No
Message language
Follows the channel or account
English
Use a webhook only where you cannot install the app â for example, where your chat administrator will not grant it permissions. Responders then have to open ilert to act on an alert.
Who can press the buttons
Accept and Resolve work for anyone in the channel, whether or not they have an ilert account. Someone without an account is recorded as the chat user who pressed the button, not as an ilert responder.
Every other button â reroute, escalate, add a responder, raise the priority, merge, comment â needs an ilert account whose email address or username matches the email address on the chat account. Where they do not match, the person is told that their chat account is not known in ilert.
Raise an alert from chat
Anyone can report a problem from a channel. Each platform offers two modes:
Restricted
Chat users who also have an ilert account
None beyond installing the app
Open
Any user in the workspace, ilert account or not
A dedicated alert source, which fixes the channels they can raise alerts from and the escalation policies they can choose
The open mode is the useful one for support and sales colleagues who need to escalate but will never sign in to ilert.
Alerts raised from chat take the priority and the alert actions of the alert source they belong to. Nobody chooses a priority in chat. The source's grouping settings do not apply: an alert raised from chat is always a new alert, because it never passes through the event pipeline that groups events.
Look up who is on call
Check who is on call for an alert source or an escalation policy without leaving the channel. The lookup shows the first escalation level of each policy: the user, the current shift of a schedule, or the members of a team.
Like alert creation, the lookup can be restricted to users with an ilert account or opened to everyone in the workspace. Opening it takes a dedicated alert source and the on-call option in its settings.
Open a dedicated channel
A channel of its own belongs to an incident. Declare the incident â from scratch, or from the alert that surfaced the problem â and create the channel with it. Responders are invited automatically, and the incident keeps the structured record while the channel carries the conversation.
Incident channels â how to open one, on any of the three platforms
Set up your platform
Connecting a workspace is a one-time step for an Admin or Account owner, in the sidebar under Settings â Connectors. After that, anyone who may create alert actions can publish alerts to a channel.
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