Instant Test Integration with Slack

In this week‘s Tip of the Day, we’re going to explore more of Catchpoint’s third-party integrations.

Last week, we discussed how Catchpoint can be integrated with existing collaboration tools focusing on Slack. The demo walked through the process of setting up an integration with the communication platform, specifically how to feed Catchpoint alert data into a Slack channel.

Today, I’m going to show you a different integration between these two solutions. We look at how to configure Slack to run on-demand Catchpoint tests from your slash commands. The on-demand Slack test uses the REST API to establish a secure connection between Catchpoint and Slack. In this week’s video, we’ll be using the Catchpoint SaaS platform, my Slack workspace, and depending on your preferences, either AWS Lambda or, if you prefer to host the code yourself, Node.js functions.

On-Demand Testing with Slack

As you know, Catchpoint offers synthetic monitoring – meaning we can simulate web traffic and transactions from the perspective of the user to provide a complete outside-in view of their digital experience. Being able to run instant tests in Catchpoint and pull results using a collaboration tool enables your support teams to respond more effectively to anomalies and disruptions.

Catchpoint’s Instant Test feature lets you create an immediate test using any of our test types and debugging tools. Instant tests can be run for any test in the system, or you can create an instant test from a blank slate. You can program different slash commands to perform instant tests with the parameters of your choice. There are 17 overall test types that range from HTML (monitoring the downloading and rendering of a piece of HTML code in an emulated or real browser) to DNS (monitoring the performance of a domain’s DNS servers).

The integration that lets you set up such instant tests from Slack is immediately useful, as you’ll see in this week’s video. Giving your support and technical teams the power of synthetic monitoring simply from a slash command significantly simplifies the process of evaluating your user’s digital experience. In the video, I’ll set up three tests for you as basic examples to illustrate how Catchpoint lets you codify your tests into discrete, shareable, and repeatable functions.

While we’re on the subject of instant tests, Catchpoint recently acquired Webpagetest.org, which covers a different aspect of on-demand testing, focused on testing the connectivity and security posture of your website. You can run a free website test from locations around the world using real browsers and at real consumer connection speeds. Check it out for yourself here.

Capitalize on Catchpoint Integrations

The integration with Slack that we’ve been focusing on in this series is only a small peek into what’s available via the Catchpoint API. In addition to Slack, we offer integrations with Splunk, BigPanda, ServiceNow, Chef, and many others. Our latest integration, released earlier this year, was for Tableau, the intelligence and business analytics platform focused on data visualization, which lets you easily correlate data points to ensure streamlined incident resolution.

In today’s video, I’m going to cover:

• How to set up a Catchpoint/Slack integration from scratch.
• How to do this using AWS Lambda or Node.js.
• The command types you can run from your integrated Slack channel
• The different types of instant tests it’s possible to execute from your integration

Let’s hop in!