Martech Health Check: Status Notifications

As a marketing operations professional, a key part of your job is administering your team’s martech platforms. You need to make sure your tools are running in tip-top shape, and it’s important to establish routines to keep your instance healthy. This post is the second in a series covering martech “health checks”: simple ways to check the pulse of your systems to proactively identify and address any issues.

Most companies have a status page where you can check for platform issues, view system metrics, and review past incidents. Many companies use Atlassian Statuspage, although some, like Adobe, have their own tool. If you’re not sure where to find the status page for a particular tool, try going to the subdomain status.companyname.com. If that doesn’t work, you can Google “company name status.” If all else fails, email your CSM.

You can—and should—subscribe to updates so you are notified any time an incident is created, updated, or closed. I’ll show you how to get updates via Email and Slack.

Subscribe to Status Updates via Email

Most tools make it easy to subscribe to status updates via email. I recommend using a team alias email, such as marketing-ops@yourcompany.com, so that everyone on your team receives the updates. This also ensures continuity if you leave your company.

If the status page is hosted on Atlassian Statuspage, simply click the “Subscribe to Updates” button and enter your email address.

Adobe requires an account login to sign up for status updates. Adobe allows you to select your Marketo Engage pod so you only get updates that affect your instance.

To find your Marketo Engage pod: 

1. Log in, click your name on the top right, and select “View My Account.”  
2. Scroll down to “Support Information” and note the datacenter

Get Status Updates in Slack via RSS

If your company uses Slack, centralizing status updates in a single channel is an easy way to keep everyone up to date. Most status pages have an RSS feed that you can pull into Slack. For example, on an Atlassian Statuspage, click the “Subscribe to Updates” button, and select the RSS icon to get the feed URL.
 

In Slack, go to the channel where you want to post the feed. Use the slash command “/feed” and paste the URL of the RSS feed. Voila!

No RSS? Send Emails to Slack

If the status page doesn’t support RSS, you can use your inbox to auto-forward email alerts to your status channel. First, make sure you’re subscribed to email updates. Next, you need to generate an email address for your Slack channel. 

In Slack, you’ll use the Email app. 

1. Go to the app, click “Add to Slack”. 
2. Choose your channel and click “Add Email Integration”. 
3. On the next page, you can get creative. I call mine StatusBot and used the robot logo for its icon. 
4. The app will then generate an email address. 

Next you’ll need to create a forwarding rule in your email. 

In Gmail, you’ll need to set up email forwarding and create a filter rule

1. Click the gear icon and select “See All Settings”
2. Select “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” and click the “Add a forwarding address” button
3. Paste in your Slack email address from the previous step
4. Gmail will send a confirmation email to the forwarding address, which should show up in your channel. Click the confirmation link in the Slack message.
5. In Gmail settings, click “Filters and Blocked Addresses” and choose “Create a New Filter” at the bottom
6. Add the alert sender email address (e.g. message@adobe.com) to the “From” Field, then click “Create Filter”
7. Check “Forward it To” and choose your Slack or email address

(If you use Outlook, you should ask your IT team for instructions on how to auto-forward emails for your version and configuration Outlook.)

More Martech Health Checks

Check out the first post in this series: MarTech Health Check: Marketo Morning Routine. And I’d love to know how you check the health of your martech stack. Let me know in the coments!

A version of this article originally appeared on Marketo’s Marketing Nation Champion Blog.