Summary

Here are some scripts and utilities I'm using to integrate Slack with other apps and services. If you find them useful and save some time feel free to use them and modify them as you wish.

There are plenty of similar scripts out there so my advice is to give them a try and see if they suite your needs better than these ones. Most of them are implemented in Perl and since I'm definitely not a Perl fan I decided to make my own. These scripts are implemented as simple bash that only require curl to be installed.

As you will see their syntax is purposely very simple and no complex bash grammar is used so they're very easy to tweak.

As of now here there are just simple scripts used to send alerts and notifications to Slack channels or users. Tailored versions for Nagios and Zabbix are provided plus a generic one that might be useful, for example, to send Slack messages from scripts on your Linux boxes. In detail:

• slack-nagios-alert.sh is the script specifically tailored for Nagios that sends alerts to Slack
• slack-zabbix-alert.sh, on the other hand, is suited for Zabbix
• slack-shell-alert.sh, in the end, is a simple script you can use from any shell

These scripts send meaningful and well formatted notifications to Slack, using different colors to give a quick idea of the severity. Moreover, back links are provided so that you just need to click on them to open the issue specific page of the monitoring platform.

To set up notifications for Nagios please refer to NAGIOS.md while for Zabbix use ZABBIX.md. SHELL.md gives simple instructions on how to use the script from any Linux shell.

Set up the Slack Webhook

In order to receive notifications you need an active Slack team and know which channel you will send the notifications to. You may wish to set up a new channel for notifications. This step is required for all the scripts in this project. For general instructions about Slack incoming webhooks just jump to this page.

You can set up your webhook by following these simple steps:

1. open the Incoming Webhook custom integration page for your team
2. in the Post to Channel box select the default channel you want notifications to be sent to (or create a new channel in place). You will be able to override the target channel or send messages to individual users when using the script to send notifications
3. in the next page take note of the Webhook URL that was generated and optionally set other fields like the webhook label, name, icon etc. The URL looks like https://hooks.slack.com/services/ABCDEFGHI/FGHIJKLMN/123abc456def789ldt645Bgs. In the Customize Name field you can set the username you want notifications to appear from. For example you may set or zabbix, nagios or any other name that might be significant for the integration.

You can also optionally set an icon to show when messages are received through the Webhook on Slack to make messages a little nicer.

Now you're ready to go on the Slack side and you can start sending notifications.

Sending messages to channels or individual users

While it's common to send messages (with these scripts and in general) to channels, you can send them to individual users instead. The only difference in the message payload is that the target channel attribute will be in the form #somechannel when sending messages to channels or @username for users. While you can configure the default channel or user in the Webhook configuration, you will still be able to override them as an option to these scripts so that, for each invocation, you can define different targets.