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Slack notifications for connection failures, delays and schema changes

Answered
Sam Jakshtis User

I would love to have Fivetran notifications directly to a Slack channel, set up per connection, without going through email or a custom webhook relay.

Why:
Our team handles pipeline issues in Slack, not email. Today the options are:
- Slack's channel email address: works, but messages arrive as plain emails with no formatting, no links to the connection and no way to filter by severity.
- Outbound webhooks through Zapier, Retool or a small service: gives richer messages, but it's one more thing to build and maintain, and alerts stop if the relay breaks.

What would help most:
1. Connect a Slack workspace once, then choose a channel for each connection or destination group.
2. Choose which events post to Slack: sync failure, sync delay, schema change, connection paused.
3. Include in each message the connection name, the error summary and a direct link to the connection's status page.
4. Post a follow-up when the issue is resolved, so the channel shows what's still open.

Context:
We run several Connector SDK connections alongside standard connectors. Custom connectors are the ones most likely to break when a source API changes, so fast alerts where the team already works matter most for them. Thanks! 

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Comments

2 comments

Date Votes
  • Official comment
    Dipti Ranjan Sahoo Fivetranner

    Hi there,

    Thanks for submitting this request! We've added "Slack notifications for connection failures, delays and schema changes" to our feature improvements backlog and it's under active consideration.

    I'd love to learn more about your specific use case — what problem are you trying to solve? Any additional context will help us prioritise effectively. For example, what are the specific connector types, data sources/ destinations you are tracking notifications?

    Thanks,
    Dipti

  • Sam Jakshtis User

    Hi Dipti,

    Thanks for the quick response, and here's more context on how we'd use it.

    The problem we're solving: 
    Our data and engineering team manages pipeline issues in Slack. When a connection breaks, the delay between the failure and someone noticing is what hurts, because downstream dashboards and models quietly go stale. Email alerts get missed or buried, and building a relay just to get alerts into Slack adds another thing that can fail silently.

    Two additions beyond my original request

    1. Webhook event alerts. For webhook-based connections, we'd like notifications for when data is received, when events fail to process, and when no events have arrived within an expected window. A webhook source that goes quiet often looks healthy from the sync status alone.

    2. Data freshness / staleness alerts. Something like what Metaplane offers: set an expected freshness per connection or table (e.g. "this table should update at least every 6 hours") and alert when it's exceeded, even if the sync technically reports success. Volume anomalies (e.g. a sync that lands far fewer rows than usual) would be a great bonus. Today we'd need a separate observability tool for this, and it would be much simpler to have it where the pipelines already live.

    Why it matters most for SDK connectors
    Our Connector SDK connections are the ones most likely to break when a source API changes, and the failure mode is often partial: the sync runs but returns empty or incomplete data. Freshness and volume checks would catch those cases that a plain failure alert wouldn't.

    Thanks! Sam