DevOps, at its core, is all about communication. It has become vital with more people than ever working from home, and more teams spread out across different offices. Teams need to have a space for collaboration, and this often comes down to choosing the right tools.
Instant communication. It has become an expectation for just about everything we do. So why expect anything less from your release automation tool? FlexDeploy offers a variety of features around this and is constantly evolving in this area as new tools and ideas arise.
Today, let’s go through two major areas where FlexDeploy can help with communication in your release process.
Real-Time Notifications
When a deployment has failed, you want to not only be notified immediately, but also find a way to minimize the time of resolution. Receiving as much context as possible will help, as will delivering the notification to a shared channel. This way, the entire team is informed immediately, and can easily collaborate as they solve the issue.
In our most recent release, we have added an integration with Microsoft Teams. The plugin has the ability to send messages to team channels or individual users. This can be invoked from build, deploy, or test workflows, or specific spots in the pipeline. With the Outgoing Webhooks addition in 5.4, you can further filter when notifications occur and what they look like. Shown below is one basic example. The table can be styled any way you like with HTML.
The same capabilities are available for Slack, and similar capabilities for email. Email notifications are built-in, so each user has the option to subscribe to email notifications for failed requests, scheduled requests, approval required, and more. These notifications can be defined at the project level for further customization or defined right in the pipeline.
Accessible Approvals
After a fix for an urgent issue has been developed, think about the next steps. Likely, there’s a required approval in place for somewhere the pipeline. At this point, you need an approval process that makes it as quick and easy as possible for approvers to complete the approval process. This means accessibility in how and where they can approve, and sufficient relevant information available.
Approving from email is provided out-of-the-box in FlexDeploy, saving time for approvers as they won’t need to go into the application. These approval emails contain projects, packages, and files in a snapshot, so approvers know exactly what they are approving for deployment. Recently, this capability has also been made available for Slack. See Simplifying FlexDeploy Approvals with Slack.
FlexDeploy offers a wide range of options to enhance team communication and can be customized to just about any use case. You can improve your process with more collaboration, visibility, and faster resolution time on deployment failures.
Additional Webhooks Resources
- Webhooks Part 1: Continuous Integration with Source Control
- Webhooks Part 2: Managing Releases with Issue Tracking
- Outgoing Webhooks: Create a ServiceNow Incident when a Workflow Fails
- Simplifying FlexDeploy Approvals with Slack
- Outgoing Webhooks Documentation
- Webhook Context Variables and Methods Reference
Download the datasheet to learn more about FlexDeploy and its capabilities.
