Most of the feedback we’ve gotten on our HipChat integration has been positive since we launched it as part of our alerting feature. The integration lets you see unusual patterns as they happen and keeps your whole team informed. If your metric data indicates something might be wrong with your infrastructure, we post a notification to your HipChat room.
With the HipChat Connect API, we were able to embed parts of the Hosted Graphite product experience into the HipChat interface (something that other chat tools don’t offer). That means it’s possible to view your active and healthy alerts, and jump directly to a Hosted Graphite dashboard – straight from HipChat.
When an alert goes off, we post a notification to your HipChat room. All alerts include a thumbnail of a graph, a link to the full size graph, the metric name related to the alert, and the conditions that caused it to fire. This card view lets us pack a lot of information into a small space, making the notification as useful as possible.
In addition, you can:
- Send private one-on-one messages
- Send room notifications
- View users, rooms, and other group information
- View room information and participants
Improvements
Up to now, only one HipChat channel could be used per Hosted Graphite account. As a result, every HipChat room with the Hosted Graphite integration would get incident alerts. As notifications were sent to all rooms, this impacted the signal-to-noise ratio and it wasn’t ideal for larger teams.
To improve this, we’ve updated the integration to give users more control over where their alerts are going. It’s now possible to send alerts to specific rooms, giving you more control over who gets notified. We’ve also included a function to name individual rooms on the notification channels page in Hosted Graphite. It’s particularly useful for larger teams to make sure the right person gets alerted at the right time.
Set Up
It’s quick to set up. If you don’t already have the Hosted Graphite integration, just install the Hosted Graphite for HipChat integration in the Atlassian Marketplace.