AlertOps and Flic

AlertOps’ alert management system can be integrated with Flic to receive and respond to all (predefined status mappings) alerts through email, SMS, push notification or phone alerts. AlertOps would ensure that the alert/job status would reach the appropriate team by using proper workflows, escalation policies and schedules. Based on your ruleset, incidents can be automatically opened and closed, depending on what kind of action Flic sends out.

Flic is a mobile app, the Flic button/hub is a physical device that needs to purchased and can integrate with a lot of hardware/software (Example - a light bulb). Any action executed as a result of the button trigger can send an alert to AlertOps to notify/alert people seamlessly. Flic is not as flexible in terms of notifications, and an integration with AlertOps would address this.

The above scenario and scope for integration is due to the fact that AlertOps has a very flexible and simple API/Webhook configuration feature that can be leveraged with Flic's action capabilities.

AlertOps - Inbound Integration

We can define rulesets in AlertOps so that Flic app can send out alerts to the AlertOps platform. AlertOps would ensure based on these notifications received, that it would always reach out and assign to the correct person/team by utilizing its escalation policies, schedules, and workflow features (typically this use-case is to alert/notify people that the button has been triggered!).

AlertOps provides Inbound Integrations to integrate with numerous monitoring, chat and ITSM tools. You can configure an inbound integration for Flic.

At a high level this is how the flow looks like, you define an API integration in the AlertOps platform by defining settings like Integration Name, Escalation rules, recipient users/groups. Once an integration is defined, a unique API URL is generated. This acts as webhook or the gateway through which notifications from Flic reach AlertOps and thus an incident/alert is created correspondingly. The API can be defined with various settings like URL mappings, filters, escalations etc. as required. Flic has to be defined with a HTTP request action.

Configure Inbound Integration in AlertOps

1. Under 'Configuration' select 'Integrations'. From the Inbound Integration section, select 'API' from the dropdown and then click the 'Add API' button.
2. Select Flic from the list of available integration options.
3. Once you selected the integration, you can then specify basic settings like the integration name, escalation policy, names of the recipients/groups for which the alerts must be assigned to.
4. Once you click save, the API Integration will be created, and you will be given a unique URL which acts as the access point and needs to be configured at the source (in this case Flic), to send alerts. You can find the integration you just created, and you can give advanced settings and define various configurations for the alerts to be received and processed. For example, you can define when to open and close alerts based on the payload obtained from the API call, filters etc. 
5. Make a note of the API URL, which will be used in Flic, so it calls a HTTP POST request to this URL with the body in JSON format containing the Flic alert specific information. AlertOps automatically creates an alert when the status variable (flic_state) contains 'On'. The incident will also be closed automatically when the status 'Off' is received from Flic.
6. You can similarly define URL mappings as you want, owing to the flexibility provided by AlertOps’ OpenAPI/Plug-and-Play integrations. You can provide other filters and match with regex expressions as well. You can also test the generated URL with the sample data provided.

Configure Integration in Flic App 

1. In your Flic App (iOS or Android), select the three dots menu icon in the top right corner and select 'Widgets'
2. Select Create Widget in the bottom. 
3. Select action as 'HTTP Internet Request'
4. Under URL, paste the AlertOps Inbound Integration API URL. Select Method as POST
5. Content Type should be 'application/json'. Under Body, add a JSON in the following format. Make sure the keys are the same, the values can be adjusted as per how you have set it up in your Flic app. Ensure the 'flic_state' has values- On or Off, as per your setup. This can be of course changed as per your wish, but has to mapped in AlertOps accordingly.

{
"flic_nameId": "<Your HUB/Phone ID>",
"flic_state": "<On/Off based on the trigger of your Flic hub/button>",
"info":"<Configure this as per your wish to add more context/info>",
}

6.  Insert the Widget and ensure it is attached to your corresponding Flic button/hub. Alternatively you can directly add the actions for your Hub/Button. You just have to ensure the JSON body is formatted properly, and actions are added for each of the 'On'/'Off' triggers

Thats it! You have configured a HTTP action. Any alert will be sent to AlertOps for incident management.

Message logs, alert specific information can be viewed in the “Inbound Log” section in AlertOps Dashboard. Alerts can be viewed in the ‘Alerts’ tab as well.

Alert Triggering Information

AlertOps will automatically create an incident when a new alert is received from Flic when the flic_state contains "On".

If an alert with status "On" matches an existing Open Alert, AlertOps will recognize the new alert as a duplicate and ignore the alert.

The alert will be recorded in the Inbound Messages table as “Mapped Appended.”

AlertOps will automatically close the same incident when an alert with flic_state contains "Off".

References

AlertOps Integration Guides

General Restful API Guide

Flic Guides