Connections

A connection is one place messages can go: a Slack channel, a mailbox, a webhook URL. The Connections page lists them with their health, and holds the catalogue you add new ones from. This page covers the screen; what to enter for each service is in the channel pages.

Select to see the whole page

Four connections with their deliveries of the last 24 hours, and below them the catalogue of channels a new connection can be made from.

Four connections with their deliveries of the last 24 hours, and below them the catalogue of channels a new connection can be made from.

The list

Column	What it shows
Name	The connection’s name. Under it, in red, “Last error:” with the most recent error of the last 24 hours, and the result of a test message if you sent one.
Kind	The channel it uses, for example Webhook or Slack app.
Delivered, 24 h	Deliveries that arrived in the last 24 hours, with a small bar showing the share that arrived of those that ended.
Failed, 24 h	Deliveries that failed in the last 24 hours. “N waiting” underneath counts the ones still pending.
State	Active, or Paused until a time; see below.
Changed	How long ago the connection was last saved.
Actions	Send test message, Setup (Slack app connections only), Edit and Delete.

The search box looks in the name, the kind and the last error. Headings sort the list; sorting by State puts paused connections first.

Adding a connection

1. Under Add a connection, pick a channel. The catalogue is grouped into Chat, Paging, Email and push, Generic and, once you have written one, Your own. A card says what the channel does and, after “Can do:”, whether it supports buttons, threads, or updating its messages.

2. Fill in the form. Name starts as the channel’s name; change it to something that says where messages go, such as #ops (Slack). The other fields come from the channel, each with a line of help underneath.

3. Press Add connection. The server validates the fields; a problem is shown above the buttons.

4. Press Send test message on the new row to check it.

For what each field means, go to the channel’s page: Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Email, ntfy, Telegram and Pushover, PagerDuty and Opsgenie and Webhook.

A connection sends nothing until a route targets it. Add it to a route under Routes.

Slack app connections

After you save a Slack app connection, a card titled “One more step in Slack for” and the connection’s name shows the address Slack must send button presses to, with a Copy button. Setup on the connection’s row shows the same card again later. The steps on the Slack side are in Slack.

Testing a connection

Send test message sends a real message through the connection, to its own destination, with the title “Test message from ramzes” and the body “If you can read this, the connection works.”

Under the connection’s name the row then shows “Test message delivered.”, or “Test failed:” with what the service answered. A test is not an event: it does not appear in the feed, in the counts or in Failures.

Paused connections

When deliveries to a connection keep failing, ramzes pauses it and holds its deliveries back instead of sending them into a service that is down. The State column then reads, for example, Paused until 14:32 “after 5 failed attempts in a row”. The pause ends by itself.

Resume now ends the pause at once and sends what was waiting. Use it when you know the service is back, or after fixing the connection. When and for how long a connection is paused is described in Delivery and retries.

Paused connections are also listed under Failing connections on the Overview.

Editing

Edit opens the connection’s form with its current settings. Secret fields are empty: stored secrets are never sent back to the browser.

• Leave every secret field empty to keep the stored secrets.
• To replace a secret, type the new value and press Save connection. On a connection with more than one secret, such as a Slack app with its bot token and signing secret, the ones you leave empty are kept.

Deleting

Delete asks first and lists the routes that send to the connection, at once or in a step of their escalation chain. Those routes are not changed: they fail to deliver to it until you edit them. With no such route the dialog says “No route sends to it.”

Your own connectors

The Your own connectors card at the bottom is for a service ramzes ships no channel for. You describe the HTTP request to send as YAML, and the connector then appears in the catalogue under Your own, tagged “your own”.

• Write a connector opens an editor with a small working example to start from. Add connector saves it.
• The table lists your definitions by Name, Kind and Added, with Edit and Delete.
• A connector that a connection still uses cannot be deleted. The server names the connections: “this connector is used by: … Delete those connections first.”

The format is documented in Your own connector and Connector definitions.