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[The Hub] Send uptime notifications via webhook

1

Hi!

Please allow more ways of receiving notifications (like adding a webhook with simple structure with: SITE, Description, Time, Date, up for how long, down for how long)

This way we could receive this in better ways rather than just email (emails is overwhelming)

Thanks!

Wed, 16 Mar 2022 23:31:40
More The Hub discussions
The Hub
  • James Farmer
    • Founder & Chair (honest)

    Hey David Suescun we will improve this with a few more methods, for example adding in SMS and as a feature of any future WPMU DEV app.

    A webhook would be nice, but broadly people want the solutions ready and made for them.

    I use a filter in gmail for mine for much the same reasons you cite (overwhelming… also I’m an inbox zero nerd).

    Does that help?

    • David Suescun
      • Design Lord, Child of Thor

      Hi James!

      SMS usually work well, but have added costs. I actually never use SMS for anything, in my country they are = spam. So i mostly ignore them.

      I would say most WPMUDEV are tech-friendly folks and gals, so Webhooks could be broadly used in many contexts, for example:
      – Via free APIWAY to send to Telegram groups with dev teams to be notified
      – Via Slack to get notified of client’s sites going under and needing attention
      – Use the webhook to create incidents in our support systems
      – etc..

      Emails and SMS are limiting in that sense.

      (I’m also inbox-zero, i have heaps of filters in gmail and outlook, and recently bought parsio.io on appsumo to process and extract data from my automated emails so i can just never read them and still get the info i need)

      Thanks!

  • Tony G
    • Mr. LetsFixTheWorld

    Gentlemen, perhaps a compromise? David Suescun I bug the team occasionally amount publishing an API so that we can push and pull information like this. James Farmer and team have been patient, always cordial, and totally realistic about how this may or may not unfold. As James noted above, the audience here is not as nerdy as we are, and email ( circa 1992 :grinning: ) seems to be the weapon of choice with this member base. OK, is what it is. I feel like we’re winning the war here, no harm in losing some battles.

    Now, James – you indicate that you’re considering SMS. My heart sinks that the company would invest effort, yet again, in a very specific solution like this, rather than a more broad solution that can be re-used. Doesn’t it just churn your soul (or at least the wallet) when you authorize development on some new interface and people go “OK, but I want a different one!”. It doesn’t need to be like that.

    Consider starting all new development with a standard flat-file format. Offer that to those who want it. Use it as your own source data for anything else that you want to offer. It doesn’t matter if you standardize on XML, JSON, CSV or name=value pairs. Just create a text file and document the schema so everyone can read it.

    From there, you can continue to offer email, or SMS, or Zapier, or IFTTT, or an API, or intergalactic subspace notification ( that’s ISSN to you humans :alien: ), built upon your own neutral standard data format for all notification types, and we will gladly do that too. Heck, at that point We can create the APIs and binding libraries around them.

    As an added benefit, if you change internal formats, storage locations, or other details, you won’t need to change your Email, SMS, Zapier, or ISNs, because the intermediate format doesn’t need to change when you change your back-end. This is separation of concerns, decoupling, dependency injection, modularization … call it by whatever TLA of the week you prefer, but it’s a well-recognized and greatly used architecture. The reason we have RFC protocols is to remove hardcoded links between clients and servers, so that we don’t need to write a browser for every HTTP server, or an email client for every mail server … and yet here we are just one level above that, locking everyone into “one size supposedly fits all” HTML documents transported over SMTP. Break the chains! :chains: :chains:

    Consider having the WPMU DEV dashboard plugin cURL-in available files, save them in each site’s ‘uploads’ folder, then remove them from your server. Again, people out here are smart enough to pull a file from a folder.
    Or just create a WP Post/Attachment item and email us a URL in plain text. Delete the post after 30 or 60 days. What? Use WordPress? I know, heaven forbid!
    If you must use email, send the source document text data (the file you will use to generate the pretty HTML emails) as a text/plain email, and/or as an attachment – skip the formatting for us, thank you very much. :pray_tone1: People out here are smart enough to pull attachments off of files for post-processing.

    What changes for the audience who like their emails? Nothing at all. They won’t know this happened. But for all of the rest of us, things do get much easier, as our freedom of choice (that silly F.O.S.S. stuff) will allow us to process and consume our data in whatever ways we prefer. And hey, you might like what happens so much that you might want to tell your members about it : “want SMS? look at what these folks are doing!” You look like heros and you didn’t have to do the SMS, or IFTTT, or API, or ISSN ( though ISSN is coming really soon and there is no SMTP-over-ISSN RFC, so you had better get ready :alien: ).

    Thanks as always for your indulgence.

  • Daniel
    • The Incredible Code Injector

    Adding additional notifications apart from email would be such an easy win/win for the Uptime and membership of WPMUDEV.

    There is an increase in the number of services offering monitoring which include SMS, Slack and Telegram for instance in https://robotalp.com which I’ve been looking at but as I have WPMUDEV Membership I really want to stick with you guys.

    Webhooks would be a good start, but offering Telegram (my 1st vote) or Slack or some other mobile chat system would be idea and cheap for the user, rather than SMS.

    Thanks for considering. Daniel

  • James Farmer
    • Founder & Chair (honest)

    Thanks Daniel – we *will* get this sorted :slight_smile: promise!

    I have to admit, I’ve come around from the idea of webhooks being valuable, especially into Slack and hey, why not Telegram and the rest.

    Our aim will be to present it in such a format that’ll work for both you guys (flexible, nerdy stuff) and also for your clients (get alerted in Slack button).