Alerting

Overview

You can set alerts to monitor sync successes and failures. Hightouch supports sending alerts via SMS, Slack, email, and PagerDuty. Alerts can be set as default for all syncs on a workspace and at the individual sync level.

Configuration

1. Navigate to the Extensions page and select Alerting.
2. If you plan on using either Slack or PagerDuty, click Configure extension. Click Set up below your preferred alert provider and either authorize Slack or provide your PagerDuty API Key. If you like, you can set up alerts through both. This step is unnecessary if you plan to enable only SMS or email alerts.
3. In the Configuration tab, click Add alert.
4. In the modal that appears, enter a descriptive name for your alert, select the Platform, Default Behaviors, and optionally enter a Minimum Alert Interval.
   • The Platform can be Email, SMS, or, if you provided credentials, Slack or PagerDuty. If you'd like to use more than one alert method, you must add an alert for each one. Sync success alerts only support Slack and Email platforms.
   • The Default Behaviors can be fatal error, row error, or Sync success
     • A fatal error is an error communicating with either a source or a destination. it's 'fatal' because the sync can't run.
     • A row error means a problem with a particular row or rows. The sync works, but one or more rows failed.
     • A sync success means a sync has completed with neither row nor fatal errors.
   • Setting the Minimum Alert Interval lets you customize your alert frequency. You set an interval in minutes. A Minimum Alert Interval of 10, for example, only allows an alert to fire once every 10 minutes. By default, alerts send as many times as they are triggered.
5. Once you've entered your alert preferences, click Create.

You can create different alerts for different types of severity. For example, you may use PagerDuty for fatal alerts and Slack for row alerts.

Once you have default alerts set up in your workspace, you can enable alerts on syncs.

Sync-level alert setup

1. Navigate to the Syncs page. Select the sync you want to enable alerting on.
2. Open the Alerts tab in the sync settings.
3. Under Enable alerts, you can see the alerts you set up for your workspace. You can override the default behavior of an alert for a fatal error, row error, or sync success. You can also see a record of when the alert was last attempted.
4. You can optionally set a row alert threshold, so you're only notified when sync errors are higher than a certain percentage of either total queried rows or synced rows. The alert threshold you set should be an integer. For example, if you want to set a threshold of 5%, enter '5'. This feature is useful when you expect a certain number of rows to fail regularly, and you don't want to be notified unless the number of errors is significant.
5. Once you've configured your alert settings in the sync, don't forget to click Save.

Advanced Slack alerts

If you're using Slack as your alerting tool, you can use a template to reference sync metadata.

When you do the general configuration to set up a Slack alert, you can reference sync metadata such as id, url, and error as templated variables in your block kit code:

[
  {
    "type": "section",
    "text": {
      "type": "mrkdwn",
      "text": "Sync: <{{ url }}>, id: {{ id }} failed with error: {{ error }}"
    }
  }
]

Available sync metadata variables

• {{ id }}
• {{ url }}
• {{ duration }}
• {{ errorType }}
• {{ error }}
• {{ sync.id }}
• {{ sync.url }}
• {{ synced.added }}
• {{ synced.changed }}
• {{ synced.removed }}
• {{ succeeded.added }}
• {{ succeeded.changed }}
• {{ succeeded.removed }}
• {{ rejected.added }}
• {{ rejected.changed }}
• {{ rejected.removed }}
• {{ finishedAt }}
• {{ startedAt }}
• {{ destination.id }}
• {{ destination.url }}
• {{ destination.name }}
• {{ destination.type }}
• {{ model.id }}
• {{ model.url }}
• {{ model.name }}
• {{ model.type }}
• {{ workspace.id }}
• {{ workspace.url }}
• {{ workspace.slug }}

Tips and troubleshooting

Common errors

No channels appear when setting up Slack alerts

If no channels appear in the Channel selector when setting up alerts, check that you've installed the Hightouch bot to your desired channels. You can find instructions on how to add the bot in our Slack documentation.