Send Alerts

Trigger Alerts by Email and Trigger Alerts by Webhook are new and improved versions of our Send Alerts workflow.

The Send Alerts workflow is a pre-built workflow template designed to help you start notifying users and groups with minimal setup. It lets you create an alert and send notifications by simply sending an email or HTTP request to xMatters.

Here are some ideas for using this workflow:

  • Start your incident management squad learning how to trigger a notification in xMatters.
  • Use it as the jumping off point (a template one might say) for building out your own, fully customized workflow. Change a few labels, update some response choices, modify an endpoint and presto — you have a production-ready workflow that’s customized for you.
  • Poke around inside and pick it apart to get an understanding of how workflows are built and how the pieces fit together.
  • Use it a handy reference when building your own workflow from scratch.

Install the workflow

  1. Click the Send Alerts tile on the Workflows Templates page.
  2. On the Install Workflow dialog box, give the workflow a name (this must be unique in your instance) and add an optional description.
    • You can edit these later, if needed.
  3. Click Install.
    • After the workflow installs, the screen shows next steps as well an installation log. The installation log gives you additional information about the installation, such as if you have languages in your instance that aren't configured for the messages in the workflow.
  4. To get started right away, simply send an email to the address listed under Try it out, changing the portion of the email address before the @ to the user or group you want to notify. For example, to send notifications to RigelServiceTeam, change your username to RigelServiceTeam.

To send notifications using the HTTP trigger, change who can send notifications using the workflow, or customize the workflow settings, click Open Workflow.

The Send Alerts notification

Here's an example of the out-of-the-box notification:

The notification provides the recipient with the following response choices:

  • Acknowledge - Acknowledge the alert and stop notifying other recipients.
  • Close - Stop notifying other recipients and terminate the alert.
  • Escalate - Immediately notify the next recipient in the escalation.

Configure workflow permissions

Whether you're kicking off an alert by email or via HTTP request, you can fine-tune the sender permissions, granting the ability to create an alert and send notifications to particular users or roles. You can also let other users with the Developer role access and edit the workflow.

Using the workflow

How you actually initiate alerts with the Send Alerts workflow varies depending on whether you're triggering the flow by sending an email or sending an HTTP request.

Do more

The Send Alerts workflow gets you creating alerts and sending notifications quickly. There's a lot more you can do if you want to. Here are some ideas:

  • Change the message content or layout: The notification sent to users includes a summary and a detailed message (for example, the subject and the body of an email). You can change this by editing the message design.
  • Change the response options: You can add or remove response options, or change what happens when a recipient selects a particular response.
  • When using the HTTP trigger, you can send information back to the calling system when there is alert activity in xMatters: drag an alert activity trigger onto the canvas and connect and configure a Webhook step to target the calling system.
  • Add additional steps to the flow: use Flow Designer to visually build flows that connect your tools and processes simply by dragging and dropping steps onto a canvas.