Sending Slack Messages with Python
This is all fine and dandy, but I would guess that you’re not the only engineer in the company and production maintenance scripts don’t run off of your laptop. We need a way to let a group of people know what’s happening when one of your scripts is run. And please don’t say email. Email has been worthless for alerting for over a decade, and there are better ways to do it. Search your feelings…you know it to be true!
At this point, we all have some magic messaging tool that someone in upper management decided we needed. There are others out there, but I would guess that the majority of companies are using Microsoft Teams or Slack with some Webex Teams sprinkled in there. These are great tools with lots of features and are probably not yet overused to point of making users ignore the messages, so they are great candidates for telling others what you broke through automation.
It’s also a good place to keep track of the history of the chaos you’ve caused. Instead of having a log sitting on a disk on a server somewhere, the log messages are recorded for posterity for everyone to see at any time. This obviously could be good or bad, but it’s better than someone calling you at 3am asking if your tasks have done something egregious. And, yes, logs are a part of IT life, and auditors will want to see them every year or two when they come onsite. We all have to keep our logs, but we can still send updates via Slack (or whatever) as well.
