37. Notifications (Slack, PagerDuty, email)

How Daalu reaches a human — and how to keep it from reaching them too often.

The notification integrations are Daalu’s outbound path to people. Each one is independent: run only Slack, only PagerDuty, both, or neither. Routing and rate-limiting sit on top, so the same alert can page on-call through PagerDuty and post a heads-up to Slack without double-noise.

At a glance

Slack

Setup

1. Managed Infra → Notifications → Add → Slack.
2. Click Authorize with Slack. A new tab opens Slack’s OAuth flow.
3. Pick the workspace and accept the requested scopes (chat:write, channels:read, users:read).
4. You’re redirected back to Daalu with the connection active.
5. In the next dialog, pick which channels Daalu may post to. For private channels, invite the app from inside Slack with /invite @daalu.

Capabilities

• Post to channels you authorized.
• Post to user DMs (for personal notifications).
• React with emoji on its own messages (acknowledgment indicators).
• Read recent messages in a channel — only on demand, via the Assistant, and never stored.

Daalu cannot post in channels you didn’t authorize, read messages outside its allowed channels, or mention users it can’t see. The OAuth scopes are the ceiling.

Per-channel routing

In Settings → Notifications, map alert kinds to channels. A common layout:

• #ops-alerts — all warnings and criticals.
• #netops — alerts labelled team: netops.
• #proposals — change-proposal notifications.
• #daalu-heartbeat — the Watchdog alert.

Removing

Managed Infra → Notifications → Slack row → Disconnect. Posts stop immediately. In Slack, also remove the app via Apps → Daalu → Remove app.

PagerDuty

Setup

1. In PagerDuty, create a service (or pick an existing one) for Daalu’s alerts to flow into.
2. Add an Events API V2 integration to that service. Copy the integration key.
3. Managed Infra → Notifications → Add → PagerDuty in Daalu. Paste the key.
4. Daalu fires a test event; you should see it “Triggered, then resolved by Daalu” in the service.

Capabilities

• Trigger PagerDuty incidents (severity → priority mapping is configurable).
• Resolve them automatically when the underlying alert clears.
• Add a note when a Daalu user acknowledges.

Note: PagerDuty’s escalation policies are what actually page people. Daalu is the source of the event, not the on-call schedule.

Multiple services

The common pattern is one PagerDuty service per on-call rotation — platform-prod, netops, data-platform. Connect each as a separate Daalu integration and route alerts to the right one by label.

Removing

Disconnect in Daalu; optionally delete the Events API V2 integration in PagerDuty.

Email

Setup

Daalu’s transactional email is configured at the platform level — the from-address and SMTP relay are managed by us. The only tenant-side controls are:

1. The per-user “send me email notifications” toggle.
2. The per-route “send to this email” rule in Settings → Notifications.

Capabilities

• Alert digests (configurable cadence).
• The daily briefing as an HTML email.
• Mentions in change proposals.
• Invite emails — this is how users get added to your tenant.

Limits

The default is 100 emails per tenant per hour, which is plenty for notifications. If you have a genuine bulk use case (a large weekly digest fanned out across the team), ask support to raise it.

Tip: Daalu’s mail authenticates SPF/DKIM/DMARC correctly, but a first send can still land in junk while your mail filter builds sender reputation. Whitelist [email protected] on first use.

Browser push

Not a separate integration — it’s built into the operator app. Enable it in Settings → Preferences → Browser push. Daalu asks for permission once; after that you get desktop notifications whenever the tab is open.

Suppression and rate-limiting

Two protections are built into the notification path so a noisy source can’t turn into a pager storm:

• Deduplication. The same alert firing twice in a short window produces one notification, not two.
• Per-channel rate limit. Daalu won’t exceed a configurable messages-per-minute rate into a Slack channel; excess is batched into a digest.

The defaults are sensible. Tune them in Settings → Notifications → Advanced.

Next: Chapter 38 — Network source of truth (Nautobot)