The corporate messaging application Slack has skyrocketed in popularity in recent years, now with more than 6 million daily users. It streamlines the communication process for workplaces through its use of channels that contain specific users and usually covers a single topic per channel. Compared to flooding an email inbox with too many emails on various topics, it’s no secret why Slack is gaining popularity so rapidly.

Last year, Slack added shared channels allowing cross collaboration of users from different companies in the app’s internal channels. “Shared Channels keeps Slack further ahead of other real-time chat providers who don’t make this nearly as simple,” said Andy Pflaum, co-founder of Astro, a Palo Alto startup whose technology lets users read their email through Slack. Astro’s goal is to simplify the email experience by connecting with other apps and automating processes.

QuantaStor SDS has supported multiple alerting methods including email, SNMP, and PagerDuty since its inception. With QuantaStor v4.5, users can now receive call-home alerts from all appliances in a given storage grid through a Slack channel in addition to the traditional methods.

Below is an example of a Call-home Alert:

Slack based alerting saves IT administrators time as notifications can now be sent directly to a designated channel in Slack, which is often a quicker and easier way to get notifications rather than other methods. QuantaStor generates alerts for all aspects of storage grid health from network issues, disk device replacement, utilization threshold warnings, and much more.

With Slack, alerts produce hyperlinked dashboard notifications which come in through a specified channel. As shown above, each alert comes with detailed information so action can be easily taken to resolve issues.

To add alerts to Slack, go to the Alert Manager and click on the Cloud Alerts tab. Add the Slack Webhook URL from your Slack app to the box provided. Then click Generate Test Alert to make sure that the alerts are going through correctly.

For more information on features and enhancements made in the latest release of QuantaStor SDS, please visit the OSNEXUS Technical Updates Blog.

Categories: Storage Appliance Hardware