Channel Notifications Are Not Always Useful

I see a lot of content online about creating channel notification about the results of automated checks.

I don’t think this is as useful as such posts sometimes try to portray.

What I have experienced is that there’s usually too many (Slack) channels that it is impossible and ineffective to catch up with what’s inside them. (Really, you want to mute most of it if you want to get some work done.)

So what people do then? They leave or mute such channels. And they leave or mute those that are most verbose first. And the most verbose ones also tend to be exactly those channels that contain notifications coming from automated checks.

Sorry not sorry, but I’ve seen this time and again. No matter how much emojis or colours you put into such notifications, they tend to get ignored.

This is not to say don’t create such notifications. Just don’t assume that anyone will read them or look for them :D

So instead of playing with such notifications, create something basic and focus on more important things — like sending the check results to a monitoring platform where the data will be stored (at least for a period of time), aggregated, and selectable.

I believe that if people really want to look into something, they tend to look into monitoring platforms (like NewRelic), that’s where they expect data they can play with.

I haven’t always worked in such an environment, but now I consider this crucial and working without it feels like being half-blind.