General: Notify on failure

[I-Dont-Remember]

Currently Workflows fail silently, with information about the error appearing in the Analytics tab. Slack will hopefully come out with native reporting, but how might Workflow Buddy improve the situation in the meantime?

It would be quite easy to wrap any calls to fail() with a attempt_notify_then_fail() function, but the open question is - who do we notify?

During execution, the workflow_step_execute event doesn't have an obvious default conversation to notify. Nothing the Bolt request context args seems viable either. Wish this could work out of the box, but I guess we'll need to look at other options.

Potential approaches:

• Add it as an optional input on all Steps
  • This seems like a frustrating annoyance for users to have to fill out every time, but does provide granularity at a step level - would hazard a guess that users would want it at the Workflow level though.
• Add it as a configuration option in the App Home
  • Let users provide a default conversation to notify for Workflow failures. This appears to be best option so far.

[jphorn]

Is notifying via Slackbot programmatically possible?

[I-Dont-Remember]

1. Which person should receive the Slackbot message though?
   • Ideally it would go to the person who created the Workflow, but as far as I can find, we don't have access to that information from within the execution of a step, or from the Slack Web API.
2. To my knowledge, you can only message from your app, whereas Slackbot is reserved for messages directly from Slack.

[jphorn]

1. I would say both -- the initiator to alert them somethings off and the responsible person is going to have a look asap. And the workflow admin to alert them with all the debugging info. But apparently that info is not available :-(

My Slack API knowledge unfortunately is quite limited. Any possibilities via Workflow Buddy's own BuddyBot as sender?

[I-Dont-Remember]

Workflow Buddy is able to send a message, so long as it has a destination.

Thinking through potential MVP (definitely not perfect, but hopefully is better than nothing):

• Allow users to configure a default conversation from App Home where failure notifications can get sent.
• Information users would need:
  • error - will of course have that since it just failed.
  • workflow name/ID - ❌Here's our first problem :( At step execution we don't have any context on the Workflow it's executing as a part of. Might be a security thing on Slack's part.

For now, we're a bit dead in the water, but I'll keep this stewing in the back of my mind.