Getting Started with Data Services Manager 2.0 – Part 5: Webhooks

Data Services Manager (DSM) 2.0 continues to provides detailed monitoring and alerting, similar to what was available in DSM version 1.x. It continues to offer both email alerting as well as webhook integration to send notifications to Slack and ServiceNow. In this post, we will look at some of the changes in the User Interface for configuring webhooks. For the purposes of this post, we will examine the configuration of a webhook to send notifications to Slack. The creation of the webhook itself is identical to how it was configured in version 1.x, so there is no point in discussing it again in this post. Instead, the focus will be on how to associate a newly created webhook with a database, and how to generate an alert to see the notification arriving in the Slack channel.

Note: At the time of writing, DSM version 2.0 is not yet generally available. Therefore some of the screenshots captured in the upcoming post may differ slightly in the final product. However, for the purposes of our getting started series of posts, this should not matter too much.

Assuming that the webhook has been created, we must now associate it with the database. To do this, select the database, then the Monitoring tab, and then click the Manage Alert link as shown below.

This will show both the associated webhooks, and also enable an administrator to modify the thresholds for the various health alerts associated with the database. Click on the Edit button, and add the slack webhook for both alerts and operational failures.

Now the configured slack channel associated with the webhook should begin to receive alerts in the event of something going awry with the database. Let’s test it by removing the uplink to the VM that is running this database. Soon after, the database should display a warning.

Let’s see what the warning is by clicking on the name of the database to see more details. The Summary view informs us that there is an alert on the database.

Click on View Alert in the banner to see more. This takes us to the Monitoring tab and now we can see the reason for the warning. The issue is that DSM is no longer getting metrics from the database (obviously because we have disconnected the virtual NIC on the database VM from the network).

Now this should event should also have generated a slack notification since we have the slack webhook added to the database alerting mechanism. Let’s see if we received it.

We have indeed received the notification. Everything is working as expected. The big difference to highlight in DSM 2.0 is that we have removed a lot of the clicks from the deployment of a database when compared to version 1.x. One of these ‘click’ items was the setup of the alerting mechanisms. We have now removed this from the database deployment steps, and moved it to a post deploy option, as shown above. We feels this makes for a much simpler user experience, but as always, we’re open to feedback. Thanks for reading this far.