1. A Live Slicer pushes health data to Amazon SNS whenever one of the following conditions occur:
   • An alert is generated for a key metric whenever the status of a monitored metric changes from “Healthy” to either “Warning” or “Critical.”
   • The status of a key metric resumes “Healthy” status.
2. Amazon SNS broadcasts Live Slicer health data to one or more destination(s) (e.g., mobile device, web server, or Slack).

Quick Start #

1. Configure health monitoring for the desired Live Slicer.
   Live Slicer health data may only be sent for metrics that are being monitored. For example, a custom monitoring configuration may be used to turn off monitoring and health notifications for one or more metrics for a particular Live Slicer.
2. Set up an Amazon SNS topic.
   Our service pushes Live Slicer health and failover notifications to the same Amazon SNS topic.
3. Configure the Live Slicer to push health notifications to an Amazon SNS topic.
4. Configure Amazon SNS to broadcast health notifications to the desired destination(s). This section explains how to set up Amazon SNS and Lambda to broadcast health notifications to a Slack channel.

Set up an Amazon SNS Topic #

1. Sign in to the Amazon AWS Management Console. If you don’t have an AWS account, sign up for one.
2. Open the Amazon SNS console.
3. Click Get started.
   Amazon SNS may require Amazon SES (i.e., Amazon Simple Email Service). Please sign up for the Amazon SES service if an error message appears within the SNS dashboard.
4. From the upper-right corner, change your location to: US West (Oregon) us-west-2.
5. Click Topics from the side navigation pane.
6. Click Create topic.
7. Click Standard.
   Our service does not support pushing notifications to a First-In-First-Out (FIFO) topic.
8. In the Name option, assign a unique name (e.g., marketing-live-slicer) to the topic.
9. Optional: If notifications will be sent over SMS, set the “Display name” option to the desired name.
10. Expand the Access policy section.
11. From the Define who can publish messages to the topic option, select Only the specified AWS accounts.
12. Set the Only these AWS users option to our AWS account ID: 545191325524
13. Click Create topic.
14. Copy the topic’s ARN.

Configure Communication with Amazon SNS #

1. Create a notification profile that determines when SNS push notifications will be triggered.
2. Assign the above notification profile to each desired Live Slicer.
   • Navigate to the Live Slicer Monitoring dashboard. From the main menu, navigate to Services and then click Monitoring 2.0.
   • From the Saved Views option, select a Slicer View that contains the desired Live Slicer.
   • Click on the desired Live Slicer.
   • From the right-hand pane, set the ((Active Notification Profile)) option to the notification profile created in step 1.
3. Define the ARN topic to which Live Slicer health and failover notifications will be sent.
   • Navigate to the Notifications page: From the Live Slicer Monitoring dashboard, navigate to Settings > Notifications.
   • Click Update SNS Topic from the right-hand pane.
   • Set the Update your SNS Topic ARN option to the ARN for the topic created above.
   • Click Save Topic ARN.

Integrate Slack with Amazon SNS #

1. Set up a Slack webhook.
2. Create an Amazon Lambda function that subscribes to the Amazon SNS topic.

Set Up a Slack Webhook #

Subscribe to an SNS Topic via Amazon Lambda #

• Subscribes to an SNS topic.
• Identifies the Slack webhook through which it will post messages to a Slack channel.
• Strips out data added by Amazon SNS.

Create a Lambda Function #

1. Open the Amazon Lambda console.
2. Click Get Started Now.
3. Click Blank Function.
4. Click the dashed box and then select SNS as the trigger for this function.
5. Verify that the SNS topic created earlier in this article is selected in the SNS topic option.
6. Mark the Enable trigger option.
7. Click Next.
8. Configure the Lambda function :
   • Name: Set the Name option to the name of the function (e.g., forward_to_slack).
   • Description: Set the Description option to a brief description for the purpose of the function (e.g., Send Live Slicer information to a Slack channel.).
   • Runtime: Set the Runtime option to Python 2.7.
   • Code: Set the Lambda function code option to the following code:
     python

     Copy

     1import json
     2import urllib2
     3
     4def forward_to_slack(event, context):
     5    # The URL for your Slack Channel's webhook
     6    url = "https://hooks.slack.com/services/ABCDE1234/FGHIJ5678/KLMNOPQRSTUV901234567890"
     7
     8    # Format the message
     9    try:
     10        # Try to navigate to the Message that was sent via SNS and strip out the
     11        # rest of the delivery information
     12        slack_data = {"text": str(event['Records'][0]['Sns']['Message'])}
     13    except:
     14        slack_data = {"text": str(event)}
     15
     16    # Dump the json to prepare it for sending
     17    data = json.dumps(slack_data)
     18
     19    # Create the request
     20    req = urllib2.Request(url, data)
     21
     22    # Send request
     23    urllib2.urlopen(req)

     Update the webhook URL defined in the code to point to the one copied in the Setting up a Slack Webhook section.
   • Handler: Set the Handler option to lambda_function. and then append the name of the function defined in the Name option (e.g., lambda_function.forward_to_slack).
   • Role: Set the Role option to Create new role from template(s).
   • Role name: Set the Role name option to the name that will be assigned to the new role (e.g., lambda_basic_execution).
   • Click Next.
9. Amazon Lambda will now allow you to review the function that will be created. Verify the correct SNS topic has been selected and that the Lambda function configuration.
10. Click Create function. Amazon Lambda will now automatically post health data to a Slack channel as it is provided by a Live Slicer.

Notification Data Format #

Sample Health Notification Data #

1{
2	"slicer_owner_username": "joe@mycompany.com",
3	"old_metric_health": "critical",
4	"metric_critical_threshold": null,
5	"current_metric_health": "healthy",
6	"slicer_current_health": "healthy",
7	"slicer": "MySlicer",
8	"metric_warning_threshold": null,
9	"current_metric_value": "TS unicast :1234 1920x1080",
10	"utc_time": "2017-01-16 19:35:49.105642",
11	"metric_name": "Signal Status"
12}