Integrate problem notifications into 3rd party systems

Problem notifications are an essential part of the Dynatrace intelligent infrastructure and application monitoring system. Some of you have asked if it’s possible to integrate Dynatrace real-time problem notifications into third-party SaaS solutions—such as HipChat, JIRA, Slack, Zapier, or PagerDuty—as well as in-house systems and notification mechanisms. Dynatrace now offers a generic WebHook-based integration that allows you to configure your own custom integrations into a nearly unlimited number of 3rd-party collaboration systems.

The only precondition is that the other third-party system must offer an incoming WebHook integration. As most modern cloud solutions offer such a HTTP/JSON-based integration, Dynatrace can reliably deliver its problem notifications into nearly all third party systems.

To define a Dynatrace custom webhook:

1. Go to Settings > Integration.
2. Select Custom integration and click Next.
3. Type a Name to identify your integration, a destination Webhook URL, and a Custom JSON payload that will accompany all outgoing Dynatrace notifications. The JSON payload can contain anything needed to automatically define problem detail strings in the target system, for example {ProblemID} or {State}. Third party cloud platforms typically generate a destination URL that includes some sort of an authorization token (OAuth). If your target platform requires authorization through HTTP basic authentication, you must also provide Username and Password.

For this example we will send Dynatrace problem notifications into a Slack channel. So we need to define an incoming WebHook within the Slack channel.

As you can see on the Slack configuration page above, a unique WebHook URL has been automatically generated by Slack. The WebHook URL is used as the target URL within the Dynatrace configuration. The Slack JSON also contains the text message that is presented to users when they receive problem alerts. To send problems to the destination address, complete the rest of the integration as shown below:

Before you can save the integration, click Test to validate the destination URL. If the HTTP request is successful, the Save button becomes active and the new integration is shown within the list of active integrations.

Once complete, the Slack channel displays your text message each time Dynatrace reports a new problem.