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Other: Send Test Notification

Felix Alonso User

In the Notifications feature, it would be really helpful if you could send a test notification when you set up a new email. Currently, when you set up notifications it isn't clear if they work. This is especially important for integrating with other services.

For example, I set up the PagerDuty email integration and added the email address to the Notifications list, but it's not clear that the integration is working right now. In fact, I won't know it's working until:

1. Something fails and we get alerts

2. Something fails, we don't get alerts, and we realize we should have gotten alerts

The second scenario is potentially very dangerous because it gives a false sense of security. There is a good chance that you never realize that you were missing an alert so you'll never fix the integration.

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Comments

8 comments

Date Votes
  • Lyndsey Fivetranner

    Hi Felix, 

    Thanks for submitting this feedback. I think this makes a lot of sense – would you be able to give me a specific example of how you use PagerDuty? 

    We are looking at how we can continue to improve our notifications and our logs over the next year, and this seems really relevant to some of the problems we are trying to solve. 

    Thanks, 

    Lyndsey

  • Felix Alonso User

    Hi Lyndsey!

    I work on a small data engineering team with 6 people. Several of us receive the Fivetran emails when there is an issue with our pipelines. However, we also have an on call schedule in PagerDuty. When an alert gets triggered in PagerDuty, a text message is sent to the on call person and a message is put in our Slack channel. The on call person then picks up the issue and attempts to fix it. This isn't always possible for a Fivetran issue, but it's still important that we are aware of issues and can communicate them to stakeholders.

    Does that help?

    ---

    Regarding the email notifications, it would be nice if there was an option to send certain types of emails. For example, Fivetran sends out resolution emails. This is helpful for people, but PagerDuty just fires another alert. (You can fix this by using a regular expression to filter emails.)

  • Lyndsey Fivetranner

    Hi Felix, that is really helpful! Thank you for taking the time to respond.

    When you say this isn't always possible for a Fivetran issue, do you mean that sometimes it's an issue that we (Fivetran) need to fix? 

  • Felix Alonso User

    Yes, that's what I mean. I may be wrong, but if a sync is delayed in the Fivetran platform, I don't think there is much we (the internal data engineering team) can do to troubleshoot. It's up to the Fivetran team to fix the issue.

  • Artur Trofymov User

    Hello, 

    I've raised the same point in the support ticket and was proposed to add my comments here.

    Me and my team would be happy to have the feature of generating automatic test message when we set a new notification channel. It allows to test the channel in situ and not wait till the error/fail happens. From our practice, a lot of data-monitoring tools have this feature, which makes the usage more flexible! 

    We we would appreciate a lot if Fivetran will have such feature available!

    Kind regards,
    Artur

  • Lyndsey Fivetranner

    Hi Felix and Artur, thanks again for the feedback. We are actually looking at re-designing some of our notification capabilities and as such will be conducting research over the next few months. If you'd be interested in inputting on this, based on this request, let me know and will set up a conversation. 

  • Felix Alonso User

    Sure, depending on scheduling I could talk to someone about notifications.

  • Lyndsey Fivetranner

    Thanks so much, Felix – I'll confirm a timeline soon. 

     

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