Slack

In a previous post, I talked about using NodePing to send downtime notifications to Slack and having those alerts go to your phone. In this post, I’m going to cover a similar concept: using Slack to track one or more RSS feeds and get alerts when a new item is posted to a feed.

To start with, you’ll want to manage your Slack instance and go to the “Apps” section. If the RSS app doesn’t exist, it should be easy enough to add. Once added, it will look like this:

Click on the RSS app, and you’ll see a list of feeds, which will probably be empty:

If you scroll down, you’ll be able to add a feed, and have alerts go to whichever channel you want. For this example, I’m using the lorem-rss feed, which generates a new item every minute:

So I’m a huge fan of the service NodePing. NodePing is a service used to monitor websites and service availability, and can ping hosts, monitor HTTP/HTTPS, other services like POP3/IMAP, DNS, and more! It can also perform “advanced HTTP” monitoring and check the HTTP response code or the content from the response! I pretty much use NodePing to monitor all of my hobbyist projects, as well as those belonging to friends.

One thing that gets tricky, however, is how to do alerting. NodePing lets you do email and text notifications, but neither feels “right” to me, especially if you want to alert multiple people at once. So I came up with a better way: sending webhooks into Slack! In this post, I am going to walk you through the process of making this happen.

Requirements

First, you’ll need to purchase a plan on NodePing. Plans on NodePing start at $8/month, but I personally recommend the $15/month plan as you can monitor up to 200(!) different services with it. You’ll also need to create your own Slack instance, and Slack has a free tier, which I recommend.

After creating a Slack instance, I recommend downloading and configuring both the Desktop and mobile clients to connect to your Slack instance.

Setting Up A Webhook In Slack and NodePing

Now that you’re signed up with both services, you’ll need to create a webhook in Slack. To do that, go to the “Applications” page on Slack’s website and choose the “Incoming Webhooks” app. Add a new integration and copy the URL of the webhook into your clipboard:

Note that whichever Slack channel you send alerts to is completely up to you. My personal recommendation is to create a separate channel just for alerts from NodePing.

Tag: Slack

Using Slack to Monitor RSS Feeds

Using NodePing To Send Downtime Notifications To Slack

Requirements

Setting Up A Webhook In Slack and NodePing