Send Slack notification when Windows program crashes?

Question

Is there any Slack integration that allows for program monitoring and to send a notification when a specific program has crashed?

Answer 1

Yes, Slack can receive messages in real-time using the Incoming Webhooks.

It only requires an internet access for your app or monitoring programm, and the capacity to make an HTTP request.

You need to add an integration to your slack team, potentially with this link :

https://your-team-name.slack.com/apps/A0F7XDUAZ-incoming-webhooks

(Disclaimer: not sure if the token A0F7XDUAZ is unique per team, or if it won't change in the future, but it seems to work at this date for all my Slack teams.)

Then, on any event (crash...), you can send an HTTP request to the webhook URL that will use a bot to post a message to a given Slack channel (configurable).

POST https://hooks.slack.com/services/T00000000/B00000000/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Content-type: application/json
{
    "text": "An error has occured on {your-programm-name}.\nLorem Ipsum dolor sic amet..."
}

You can of course customize the message to include informations about the cause, stacktrace etc.

Slack even provides a Message Builder to help you build the template of your message.

This is a good way to know if a program has a problem.

If, however, you are building the programm, and would like to track bugs, you have better alternatives to Slack, using real bug-trackers which are much more powerful. My best advice from now on is sentry.io. It includes all the informations you usually need about the bug environment, and can alert you in real-time at least by e-mail, maybe even within Slack someday!