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Send AlertINT findings to Slack channels.

AlertINT posts structured Block Kit messages to Slack after every completed incident analysis. When alerts recover, the original message is updated in-place and a thread reply is posted — one message per incident, no channel noise.

Synthetic incidents fired by alertint drill are unmistakable in a shared channel: every surface of their card — headline, thread details, and the plain-text fallback — carries a 🧪 DRILL banner, so a drill never reads as a real incident to a teammate scrolling past.

Setup — Slack app with bot token#

Bot tokens let AlertINT track the message it posted. When an incident fires, AlertINT posts a rich Block Kit message and records its position in the channel. When all alerts recover, it updates that message in-place (🔴 → ✅, a duration field appears) and posts a short resolution note in the thread.

  1. Create a Slack app. Go to https://api.slack.com/apps and click Create New App → From scratch. Name it AlertINT and select your workspace.

  2. Add the chat:write scope. In the left sidebar, click OAuth & Permissions, scroll to Bot Token Scopes, and add chat:write. That is the only permission AlertINT needs.

  3. Install to your workspace. Scroll to the top of OAuth & Permissions and click Install to Workspace → Allow. Slack displays a Bot User OAuth Token starting with xoxb-. Copy it.

  4. Invite the bot to your channel. In Slack, open the channel where alerts should appear (create #alerts if needed) and type /invite @AlertINT. The bot must be a channel member to post there.

  5. Add the token to your .env file — the same file that holds your other secrets. Never put the token value directly in config.yaml:

    # .env  (gitignored — never commit this file)
SLACK_BOT_TOKEN=xoxb-...

  6. Add Slack to your config.yaml under notify. Use the env var name — not the token value itself:

    notify:
  slack:
    enabled: true
    bot_token_env: SLACK_BOT_TOKEN  # name of the env var — not the token value
    channel: "#alerts"              # channel name or ID where alerts should post

What happens at runtime:

  • Firing — posts a brief main-channel message (name + root cause) and immediately posts the full analysis — severity, confidence, correlation findings, MCP hint — as a thread reply.
  • Resolved — updates the original main-channel message in-place (header changes 🔴 → ✅, duration appears) and posts full resolution details — duration, alert count, resolved time — as a thread reply.

Message structure#

Every notification uses Slack Block Kit. The same blocks appear for firing and resolved — only the header and fields change on resolution.

Block Description
Main — header 🔴 INCIDENT DETECTED when firing, updated to ✅ INCIDENT RESOLVED in-place when resolved.
Main — root cause One-sentence root cause hypothesis, preserved when the message is updated on resolution.
Main — footer Incident ID, alert count, group key, and start time. Replaced by resolved time and duration on resolution.
Main — agent handoff investigate incident <id> using alertint — the MCP call to action, with the full incident ID. Dropped when the incident resolves.
Thread — analysis Posted immediately after the main message: severity, confidence, alert count, and group key in a fields grid.
Thread — evidence One line: per-source counts (Prometheus/Loki/Changes/Sentry) that fed the triage, e.g. Prometheus 21 metrics · Loki 0 lines. A connector that could not be reached shows unreachable instead of a count; a known-issue short-circuit shows skipped (known issue); a zero-connector install shows no sources configured. Always present.
Thread — findings Bullet list of correlation findings. Only shown when the LLM identified more than one contributing factor.
Thread — agent handoff The same handoff block, so the call to action reads identically on every firing surface.
Thread — resolved Posted when all alerts recover: duration, alert count, and resolved timestamp in a fields grid.

Example — firing#

Two messages are posted: a brief main-channel message and an immediate thread reply with the full analysis.

Main channel:

🔴 INCIDENT DETECTED — API Tier Degraded: CPU Saturation + Error Spike

Root cause: CPU saturation on api-2 is causing request queuing, elevating
error rates and response latency across the cluster.

Incident a1b2c3d4 · 3 alerts · group cluster=prod · started 14:37 UTC

🤖 Investigate in your AI agent
investigate incident a1b2c3d4-5e6f-7a8b-9c0d-1e2f3a4b5c6d using alertint

Thread reply (posted immediately):

Analysis details

Severity: HIGH        Confidence: 91%
Alerts: 3             Group: cluster=prod

Evidence: Prometheus 14 metrics · Loki 6 lines · Changes 1 · Sentry 2 issues

Correlation findings
• HighCPU (api-2) fired 15 s before HighErrorRate — causal ordering confirmed.
• HighLatency shares the same instance label, indicating single-host origin.

🤖 Investigate in your AI agent
investigate incident a1b2c3d4-5e6f-7a8b-9c0d-1e2f3a4b5c6d using alertint

Example — resolved#

The original main-channel message is updated in-place and a resolution note is posted in the thread.

Main channel (updated in-place):

✅ INCIDENT RESOLVED — API Tier Degraded: CPU Saturation + Error Spike

Root cause: CPU saturation on api-2 is causing request queuing, elevating
error rates and response latency across the cluster.

Incident a1b2c3d4 · resolved after 15m · 14:52 UTC

Thread reply:

✅ All clear — all alerts have recovered.

Duration: 15m    Alerts: 3 recovered    Resolved: 14:52 UTC

Incident a1b2c3d4 · duration 15m

The MCP hint in the message footer is a pre-filled tool call. Paste it directly into Claude Code, Cursor, or Windsurf to open the full evidence pack for that incident — see MCP clients.