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On-call report

Ryan Terrian
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I am trying to create a report for 10 support teams that returns the current employees that are on call. This report can either be automatic or be triggered by a quick message. I am not a developer and am having trouble sorting through the integration builder. Any help?

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  • Ryan Terrian

    Hi, 

    Thanks for the help I like the second method better. I am trying to use python but am not a developer. Would you be able to produce the code if I gave you my API and the on-calls that I want?

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  • Alex Wu

    Hello Kam, Do you know if xMatters has a report scheduling function and sends the report on a weekly basis?  Thanks.

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  • Adam Watson

    Hey there Alex,   I don't think there's a way to schedule the standard who's on call report I'm afraid.

    I've seen a few people schedule an event send in xMatters that kicks off a get of the who's on call api, formats the result and then emails that to some contacts in a new event.

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  • Travis Depuy

    Hey Alex,

       One of our consultants put this together for a client. It posts the on-call schedules into a Slack or MS-Teams channel:

    https://github.com/xmatters/xm-labs-xMatters-Post-Daily-On-Call-to-Chat-Ops

    You could tweak it though, to send an event instead of posting to Slack. It would take some noodling to get it to target the group though. The way it works is to collect the on-call details for multiple groups and then dump them in one place. However, if you wanted to target those groups individually I think you would need a loop. Somewhere. Let us know if you dive into it, or if you go the ChatOps route. 

    Happy Tuesday!
        --- Travis

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  • Craig Gulliver

    Hi Ryan,

    Our support team will reach out to you to set up a call if you would be open to discussing the requirements you have for your support teams.

     

    Thanks,
    Craig

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  • Alex Wu

    Hi Adam, Travis & Craig, 

    Thank you.  I am in the process of following the instruction to set this up.  I was wondering if I could get some help for posting the who is on-call to the Teams channel.  If you have any specific instruction for Teams that would be awesome.  Thanks in advance.

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  • Adam Watson

    Hey there Alex, sounds like a fun use case.     Did you find this page on setting up the Teams step yet?

    https://help.xmatters.com/ondemand/xmodwelcome/flowdesigner/microsoft-teams-steps.htm

     

    PS - If you want to do more fun stuff with teams check out this, though you shouldn't really need it for what you're doing as the built in step should work fine to post.

    https://github.com/xmatters/xm-labs-step-msteam-channels

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  • Alex Wu

    Hello Travis,  

    Is there any tweeking required before I can use the solution you have suggested?  I followed each steps but the scheduled messages got terminated.   Any insight would be helpful.

    https://github.com/xmatters/xm-labs-xMatters-Post-Daily-On-Call-to-Chat-Ops

    BTW. do you know if the slack channel should be a private or public channel?

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  • Matthew Steele

    Hello Alex,

    The schedule message is working as intended. It should self-terminate after 3 minutes. It does this because we want to keep your event logs clean. The flow which posts to slack will run before the event is terminated.
    You must not be getting the results of who is on call in your slack channel. Likely an authentication error or possibly something in the script.

    Here are a couple things that should help:

    1. For testing, you can manually initiate the xMatters event instead of waiting for the schedule job. Go to the messaging form and click send. This will help you test more easily.

    2. After manually initiating the event, go to the Flow Activity Stream and check for errors.

      Chat Ops Who's On Call (communication plan) -> Edit Flow -> Chat Ops Who's on Call (Flow) -> Activity (Top right corner) -> Event Status activity stream (Make sure logging is turned on).You can look here for any errors.

    3. Make sure that you have authenticated with the slack Endpoint.

    4. Make sure the Slack user you authenticated with has the rights to post in the channel that you want your on-call to be posted in.

    5. Does the user initiating the event (likely your user) have a group supervisor role in xMatters? It could be that you need to create the schedule job with a different user. The initiating user of the event is the user that authenticates the flow step to get the on-call.  Your user may not have the required permissions to get the on-call schedule. The activity stream logs would tell you if this is the case. You will see a 403 forbidden message if this is the case.


    Hopefully this give you some things to try.

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  • Alex Wu

    I added 20% in between the groups name as a workaround for now and the on-call message posted to the slack channel. 

    Is there anyway to fix the format and layout of the message?  The posted message is awkward unreadable.

    Couple of things:

    1.  Is there a way to show the on-call list for the whole day instad of just the current on-call?

    2. Is there way to read the actual on call's name one level down? example is the COPS OnCall (oncall)?  As you can see the name for the rotation is not showing for multiple teams.

    3.  Is there a way to edit the name of "xMatters Slack Endpoint" ?

    AST%20Fulfillers - COPS OnCall (oncall)/nInfrastructure%20Fulfillers - INFRA OnCall (Oncall-Infra)/nMiddleware%20Fulfillers - Anthony Thomas (Kxxxxx)/nClinical%20Systems%20Fulfillers - Srixxxxx Yexxx (Kxxxxx)/nTechOps%20Fulfillers - Axl xxxx  (Wxxxxx)/nRLTG%20Operations%20Fulfillers - Txx xxxxxn (Oxxxxxx)/n

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  • Alex Wu

    Hello Matthew,

    Thank you so much for your response.  I really appreciate your hard work on this. 

    I have tried it out and this work great and I have a couple of suggestions and was wondering if this could be added.

    1. Have an option to show on-call resource’s phone number
    2. Can the same message that got posted to the Slack channel also be emailed to on-call resource?  (Not sure if there is already an option to configure.)

    thanks!

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  • Matthew Steele

    Hey Alex,

    I have updated the integration to include an optional method to add devices to your chat ops message..

    In my experience, on-call resources do not appreciate their contact info getting posted into a channel for anyone to start calling them at will.

    Although I have added the feature, I caution against using it. This is really taking you back to the old days of a printed on-call list with contact details.

    xMatters makes it so you do not need to reach out to people manually in this way. Using xMatters to notify your on-call group will yield a much better response than manually calling from a list of devices.

    The intent of this integration was to post who is on call to a chat ops tool so users can see if they are on call from that tool. If you want to notify a group or an on-call resource, this is better done from xMatters.

    Hopefully this makes sense.

    2. This really sounds like you want to let people know about upcoming shifts / on call.

    This could be better accomplished using the existing on-call reminder features in xMatters.
    https://support.xmatters.com/hc/en-us/articles/360020719391-Reminders-for-your-next-on-call-shift

    Hope this helps and thanks for all your feedback on this integration.

     

     

     

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  • Francois Groulx

    Hi Ryan,

    Thanks for the suggestion! It may be possible to do this, the intention with the integration was to post the immediate on-calls with escalations so the flow was able to be seen. There is a notion of primary and secondary on-call and we wanted to be able to capture and provide that.

    Let's see if we can get Matt or one of his colleagues to look into options so the integration can be more flexible to show either only the primaries or both primary and secondaries.

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  • Ryan Terrian

    Thanks Matthew that worked! Is there a way to have it post in MS Teams as plain text and not as an image?

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