Knowledge Base

Sending Notifications to a Slack Channel Data Ingestion & Notifications

Context

If you and your team use Slack for communications, MSP Process can alert you when an event occurs by sending notifications to a Slack channel. Examples of this include:

  • Putting a message in a Slack channel when a critical priority ticket is logged in your PSA
  • Putting a message in a Slack channel when one of the platforms you use to power your business (for example, your Backup solution) logs a failure

Creating the Slack App

  1. Login to the Slack API site (https://api.slack.com/apps)
  2. Click the Create an App button
  3. Choose the From a manifest option
  4. Choose which workspace you'd like to develop the app in; click Next to move to the next step:
  5. When prompted to insert a manifest, click on the YAML tab
  6. Enter the following text into the YAML tab
    • _metadata: major_version: 1 minor_version: 1 display_information: name: MSPProcess features: bot_user: display_name: MSPProcess always_online: false oauth_config: scopes: bot: - incoming-webhook settings: org_deploy_enabled: false socket_mode_enabled: false token_rotation_enabled: false
  7. Click Next
  8. Click Create to finish creating the app

Customizing the Icon of the Slack App

By default, any new Slack app uses a default icon. You'll likely want to customize that icon, so that it's easier to see when MSP Process has posted to your Slack channel.

  1. In the https://api.slack.com/apps website, edit the MSP Process app that you just created
  2. Navigate to Settings -> Basic Information
  3. At the bottom of the page, in the Display Information section, upload the logo below into App Icon & Preview.
  4. Click the Save Changes button when ready

Creating a Webhook in Slack for MSP Process to Use

  1. In the https://api.slack.com/apps website, edit the MSP Process app that you just created
  2. Navigate to Features -> Incoming Webhooks
  3. At the bottom of the page, click the Add New Webhook button
  4. When prompted, choose which Slack channel this webhook will post into
  5. Once you've saved that webhook, copy it into your clipboard; you'll need it for the next step

Configuring a Notification To Send Messages to a Slack Channel

  1. Login to MSP Process
  2. Open the Notifications module
  3. Click the Create button to add a new Notification
  4. Configure the Notification as needed:
    1. Give it a Name
    2. Select which Data View it should use (for example, an App Bot or a Webhook)
  5. Enable the Slack output by clicking on it, and then configure the Slack settings by clicking the gear icon
  6. Configure how MSP Process will send messages into your Slack channel by doing the following:
    1. Provide the webhook URL from the previous section
    2. Configure what the payload of the message will be - note that you can use variables to insert dynamic data from the Data View
  7. Click Test to ensure that MSP Process is able to communicate with Slack; you'll see a "Hello, world" test message show up in the Slack channel
  8. Click Update to save the Slack configuration in MSP Process
  9. Click Create to save the Notification in MSP Process

Congratulations! You've now configured MSP Process to send a message to a Slack channel.

Receiving Ticket Updates from HaloPSA Data Ingestion & Notifications

Use Case:

You're an MSP who leverages HaloPSA, and you want MSP Process to be aware of ticket changes in HaloPSA, so that you can notify whomever is on-shift when critical issues come up.

The functionality outlined in this KB article is only available on the Pro plan for MSP Process.

Creating a Webhook Receiver in MSP Process

  1. Login to the MSP Process UI (https://app.mspprocess.com
  2. Navigate to the Data Sources -> Webhooks page
  3. Click the Create button to create a new Webhook receiver
  4. Click the Get button to generate a URL
  5. Click the Copy () button on the right-hand side of the URL; you'll need the URL in the next section
  6. Leave this MSP Process window open, on this page; you'll be coming back to it in a later step

Configuring a Webhook Trigger in HaloPSA

  1. Login to your HaloPSA tenant
  2. Navigate to Configuration -> Webhooks
  3. Click the New button in the top right-hand corner of the HaloPSA UI
  4. Specify a name for the webhook (we recommend MSP Process - Ticket Status Changes)
  5. Paste the URL from the previous section into the Payload URL field
  6. In the Payload section, ensure that Use a custom payload is chosen in the Payload drop-down menu
  7. In the Events section, click the button
  8. Choose Ticket Status Changed from the Event drop-down menu
  9. Click Save

Sending A Test Event To MSP Process

  1. In HaloPSA, change the status of a ticket
  2. In the MSP Process UI, you'll see the webhook payload appear:
  3. Specify a name for this Webhook Receiver in the Integration Name field
  4. On the right-hand side of the UI, you can uncheck any fields that you don't want to store or process
  5. Check at least one instance of the ID field - that'll tell MSP Process how to uniquely identify this event. In this context, choose the ticket_id field
  6. Click Submit
  7. In the Data View Creation pop-up that appears, check the link to webhook option, and then click the Create button

Congratulations! HaloPSA will now send webhook events to MSP Process whenever the status of tickets change.

For instructions on how to send notifications - through e-mail, SMS, Slack or Microsoft Teams - refer to this KB article.

Notifying On Ticket Status Change Data Ingestion & Notifications

Use Case:

You want to notify your technicians, with a text message, when a ticket's status changes - for example, to an "Escalated" status.

This KB article will guide you through what you need to setup; if you want to send.....an e-mail, or a Slack message, or a Teams message though, the same steps apply.

Ingesting Ticket Data From Your PSA:

For ConnectWise or Autotask, you'll setup an App Bot that will query your PSA every 5 minutes for ticket updates.

For HaloPSA, you'll configure HaloPSA to send a webhook event to MSP Process whenever a ticket changes status. Click here for the KB article that outlines those steps.

  1. Navigate to Data Sources -> App Bots
  2. Click the Add New button
  3. Give the App Bot a name - such as Ticket Observer
  4. Choose the Autotask or ConnectWise ticket observer (depending on which PSA you use)
  5. The App Bot needs to know how to communicate with your PSA: choose it from the PSA Integration menu
  6. Click Submit, and you're done! MSP Process is now going to ingest ticket-related data from your PSA every 5 minutes.

 

Viewing the Data From Your PSA:

If you're curious to see what data we've been ingesting from your PSA, you can see it from the Data -> Data menu:

Configuring a Notification:

  1. Open the Notifications module:
  2. Click the Create button
  3. Give this Notification a name (suggestion: Notify on Ticket Status Changes), and choose the Ticket Observer Data View:
  4. Open the Filter section, and find the StatusName field; click on the + sign on the right-hand side:
  5. Click on the + sign to choose from the list of Statuses that MSP Process has observed:
  6. Select the status you want to get notified on, and click the > button to save your selection. The Filter section should now look like this:
  7. Scroll to the bottom of the Notification; click on SMS to enable that output, and then click on the "gear" icon to configure it:
  8. Configure who should receive the text message, either by manually typing in their phone number, choosing one of your technicians from the drop-down menu, or specifying that a Notification Group (i.e. whoever is on-shift at that time). Also, configure the text message that is to be sent:
  9. Click Update when everything has been configured
  10. Click Create to finish creating the Notification

 

Congratulations! You've configured MSP Process to send your technician a text message whenever the status of a ticket is changed to a specific value. 

 

Setup ConnectWise Schedule Notification Data Ingestion & Notifications

This support article will help you setup Schedule Notifications for ConnectWise Manage using our Automation Bots. 

Go to Data Sources -> App Bots

Click on Create at the top right corner as shown below: 

 

 

Click Enable and Select Process Identity and Non-Idenity fields as shown below:

Give it a name and select ConnectWise Scheduled Entry Observer

Click Integration and select ConnectWise and it will fill in all the integration fields. 

Then choose dataLastDays field and set it to a minimum of 3 days but we recommend 7 days. This will sync up scheduled data from the last 7 days so the system has a baseline for existing scheduled entries.

Click Submit. 

 

Once this is submitted the system will create a Data View for this App Bot. You can review the data by clicking Data and selecting the view. 

You can then setup notification rules to target this data:

Ex: When you want to send out a notification on a new scheduled entry for a tech, when an appointment is coming up or past due. 

Ex 2: Notify clients based on technician being scheduled on their ticket. 

 

Below is a sample notification where we are sending the tech a reminder notification 45 minutes before the call is due. Notice the last option should be turned on to skip the initial notification (ie when the resource was first scheduled). This prevents duplication on the notiifcations. 

If we did not use the repeat notification, then the system would just sent notifications when resources are scheduled on a ticket. 

 

 

Update Purchase Orders to ConnectWise Data Ingestion & Notifications

To post updates from an email that was parsed to a ConnectWise PO you can enable this on the Notification level as shown below: 

Click Integration and select your integration PSA name and it will autopopulate the fields as shown below. 

The next screen you can right click in each of the fields and add the variables to it.