Absolutely Amazing! Azure Alert Anything, or Anyone, Anywhere, Automatically, Always!

Ah! Well, let me just start by explaining that this last year has given me both my most treasured MVP award AND the most awesome short project for Microsoft, working on one of their flagship IoT "data telemetry" projects. So now I emerge from these two sources of knowledge, blinking at the light of day, feeling a bit like that Matrix/Neo moment, where he takes off that super learning headset thing (a HoloLens obviously) and says "I know Kung Fu".

IoT is an absolutely amazing concept that has of course been around long before the name!

But with Microsoft targeting it, real world uses are now just a few clicks away!

Take for example the power of Logic Apps and Azure Functions.

Little chunks of "function". Just sitting there, waiting to help, or regularly checking stuff.

 

And between all the features available in Azure, Microsoft have really been working hard to cross all the T's and dot all the I's!

I truly believe there is not much left that we could not automate. Right down to a Raspberry Pie Cream Pie Flinger!!  Ok so link is a strawberry flinger, but we all have to start flinging somewhere right?

For example, I have an Azure Function that periodically checks for changes from another company's API. We use 3G devices in some machines to transmit data. We can monitor the health/connectivity of those devices from the vendor's website, who have a standard API.

Over the last few years Microsoft have been working hard to bring alerts to all these streams of data, queues of events and timed updates.

 

And that's where this story actually starts. With my need for more integration!

I have some Stream Analytics which take device data from IoT Hub to cold storage, and also a Power BI streaming dataset.

Emails are ok, but I wanted something that notified the whole team of a slack channel.

As the team may change, I'd rather leave the Slack admin to handle the group, not have to maintain my own email list of current members.

 

Stream Analytics have had WebHooks for some time now, so I hoped it would be simple and I wasn't disappointed!

A quick search found this little gem.

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Yes, it's a win for the community again!
By the time I come looking (a year and a half later), we have this:

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The link was broken, but easily found.

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Saved me a whole heap of pain.

With a bit of fiddling and one manual task, I soon had my alerts being auto-posted to Slack!

 

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Thanks for reading!

Pete Laker (Azure MVP)
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