Incident API

Send events to Squadcast using Incident API - Squadcast’s generic API Webhook

This document will help you configure Incident API to route alerts from monitoring tools or your internal (bespoke) systems into Squadcast. Incident API can do both, trigger and resolve incidents in Squadcast, through HTTP POST requests. Route detailed monitoring alerts coming in via Incident API to the right users in Squadcast.

How to configure Incident API

In Squadcast: Using Incident API as an Alert Source

(1) On the Sidebar, click on Services.

(2) Select an existing Service or Add service

(3) Click the corresponding Alert Sources

(4) Search for Incident API from the Alert Source drop down menu and copy the webhook. Use this webhook to send HTTP POST requests

Important

For an Alert Source to turn active (indicated by a green dot - Receiving alerts against the name of the Alert Source in the drop-down), you can either generate a test alert or wait for a real-time alert to be generated by the Alert Source.

An Alert Source is active if there is a recorded incident via that Alert Source for the Service in the last 30 days.

Add header before making POST request

Ensure that you add a header Content-Type with value application/json while making the HTTP POST request

The body of the POST request should contain the details of your incident in the following format:

{
  "message": "This will be the incident message",
  "description": "This will be the incident description",
  "tags" : {
    "tagname1":"Tag value#1",
     "tagname2":"Tag value#2",
     "tagname3": {
       "color": "Valid HTML HEX Colour Notation goes here",
       "value":"Tag value#3"
     }
  },
  "status": "trigger",
  "event_id": "6"
}

Mandatory fields within the JSON

Kindly note that the message and description fields in the JSON are mandatory to trigger an incident in Squadcast. You can enrich your incidents by adding other details optionally, in the same format as seen above in the example JSON

Payload Size Limitation

The payload size is limited to 30KB. Any payload that crosses this limit will not be processed.
You will receive [HTTP Status Code 413](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/413) to notify you of this.

Event Identification and Resolution

This section will give you an understanding of how one can associate alerts with Squadcast incidents and resolve them with an API call.

Typical Incident JSON

{
  "message": "This will be the incident message",
  "description": "This will be the incident description",
  "status": "trigger",
  "event_id": "6"
}

This triggers an incident and associates the incident with the event_id value as specified. This event_id can be used to resolve the above created incident with an API call.

To resolve an incident, a JSON with the format as shown below should be sent.

{
  "status": "resolve",
  "event_id": "6"
}

The status field should be set to value "resolve"
The associated event_id should also be sent along with this

Resolving an Incident with an API call:

To resolve an incident, message and description fields are not required to be sent.

Add a Tag From directly Incident JSON

This section will give you an understanding of how you can add tags to an incident straight from the Incident JSON using the Incident API.

Typical Incident JSON:

{
   "message":"This will be the incident message",
   "description": "This will be the incident description",
   "tags": {
     "tagname1":"Tag value#1",
     "tagname2":"Tag value#2",
     "tagname3": {
       "color": "Valid HTML HEX Colour Notation goes here",
       "value":"Tag value#3"
     }
   }
}

Example 1: Using `tags` to set Severity for the incident

{
  	"message": "Error rates higher than usual",
    "description": "HTTP Error rates for srv_90 is above 90 counts/hour",
    "tags": {
    	"severity": "high"
    }
}

Default colour for Tags:

If a colour code is not mentioned explicitly, then the system takes the default colour "#808080" (gray) for tags

To specify a colour explicitly for tags:

{
	"message": "Error rates higher than usual",
  "description": "HTTP Error rates for srv_90 is above 90 counts/hour",
	"severity": {
  	"colour": "#FF0000",
  	"value":"backend"
  }
}

Example 2: Adding different tags to an incident

{
	"message": "Error rates higher than usual",
  "description": "HTTP Error rates for srv_90 is above 90 counts/hour",
	"tags" : {
   	"priority": "P1",
	  "impact_level": 5,
   	"classification": {
    	"color":"#FF0000",
     	"value":"backend"
     }
 	}
 }