Vendor status alerts in Slack, without the noise
Slack and Teams alerts from $19 a month.
Slack is where most engineering and support teams notice things. Putting vendor status updates there means the person who sees errors also sees that the payment provider just posted an incident. Here is how to set it up so the channel stays useful.
How Outage Clock connects to Slack
We post through a Slack incoming webhook. You create the webhook in your Slack workspace for the channel you want, paste its URL into Outage Clock, and send a test message. Each webhook posts to one channel, so you can add several to route different vendors to different places.
Microsoft Teams works the same way with a Teams incoming webhook.
A channel layout that works
#vendor-status for engineering. Critical infrastructure and product dependencies, with component filters on.
#it-status for IT or ops. Internal tools such as email, calendar, video calls and file storage.
#support-heads-up for support. Only vendors whose outages customers will notice, so agents can prepare replies.
On Pro, up to five alert channels lets you set this up with room to spare.
What each message contains
- Vendor and component, for example "Stripe: Webhooks"
- New status, such as degraded or major outage
- The latest update text from the vendor
- Time of the change
- A follow-up message on each update and when it is resolved
Keeping updates in the same format across vendors means people can scan the channel quickly.
Keeping the channel useful
Filter by component. Following every AWS region and service will bury the alerts that matter. Pick what you use.
Use the digest for low-priority vendors. Tools that matter but are not urgent can go into a daily summary email instead of Slack.
Do not mix with your own alerts. Keep vendor status separate from your own monitoring alerts so people know the difference at a glance.
Review the list every quarter. Remove vendors you stopped using and add new ones.
Agree on a reaction. For example, an eyes emoji means "someone is looking at our impact", a check mark means "no impact for us".
The RSS alternative
Slack can subscribe to RSS feeds, and some vendor status pages publish them. That works for a few vendors. It does not filter components, the message formats vary, and you are relying on the feed reader's polling schedule. Outage Clock reads JSON feeds, RSS, Atom and HTML pages and presents them all the same way.
Using a webhook instead
If you want events in a tool other than Slack, use the generic webhook. Business plans add custom payloads, so you can shape the JSON for your incident tool or internal bot.
Example message
> GitHub: Actions moved to degraded performance at 14:06 UTC. > Latest update: "We are investigating delays in starting Actions workflow runs." > You follow: Actions, Webhooks, Git operations.
Short, scannable and specific enough that whoever is on call knows whether to care.
Questions
Does Outage Clock need a Slack app install?
Not at launch. Incoming webhooks are enough and need no extra permissions.
Can I get alerts in Slack on the Free plan?
Free sends email alerts. Slack and Teams start on Starter.
Can different vendors go to different channels?
Yes. Add a webhook per channel and choose which vendors route to each.