Slack’s an amazing product, it has taken the market sector it sits in by such storm that the big players have all stood up, taken notice and are curating thier own “Slack killers”.

I thought i’d share an alternative use for Slack, other than Team collaboration.

Using Slack to collate your HomeLab Information

Now I get it, there will probably be comments depending on where this ends up being linked from ranging from the inevitable “thats a stupid idea” to the “huum, i’ll have a look at that” I’m posting this as it’s a system which has worked for me, and considering Slack is all about teams, I thought it was interesting to find another use which fell a little outside the normal use box.

I guess also if you’re working for a small company and looking to maybe expand your IT operations, this system is scalable much quicker than the trying to resetup various daily information to not just go to your account..

So what am I doing?

Well i’ve setup Slack on the free tier, i’d consider paying for it it i expanded it further than this. The central idea was one of having as much information being pumped out of my home IT setup into a location which wasn’t email or a myriad of webpages and interfaces. With the number of plugins and active development community it seems every man and his dog are interfacing with Slack so ended up here.

Syslogs with PaperTrail

While I have used systems like Graylog in the past, for the ease of use and the simlicity of connectivity i’ve been pusing my syslogs out the the free Tier of https://papertrailapp.com/

I’m not that fussed about the length of time the log files are kept on this level, 7 days is fine, one of the reasons i’m not that fussed is because i’ve setup alerting on PaperTrail which if triggered posts hourly to Slack. I also post a general hourly log alert hourly to a Slack channel as well.

Between the alerts I have setup and the ability to then search through them using slack, i’ve got most of what I need from a logging perspective (I keep a months worth of local syslogs should I need them as well) being pushed nativily via PaperTrail into Slack and get slack alerts to let me know.

the search facility within slack and to be able to search through all the log alerts i’ve recieved in a slack channel is a HUGE bonus here.

Reminders, Lists with Any.do

If I need to set myself reminders, I can do this via Alexa or Any.Do, these are fed back into Slack which will remind me using the Slack interface of things I need to do on the system.

Email forwarding/Astrobot

This one is interesting, Slack’s free Tier supports email forwarding, and as I have my own email address for various things which happen on the Home system, instead of turning these off when I moved over to using slack, i just forwarded the mail account to send all the mails to Slack.

I don’t need to reply to any of them, they all end up in a channel, and again, i can search through them if needed..

Very simple, and effective.

Knowledgebase with Guru

This feature made me start using Slack like this. I was looking for a more cost effective solution than running a Confluence Knowledge base at home and ended up finding Guru. (getguru.com) .

While I love and use regularly the Guru web interface, the ability to search the 1000+ articles I have directly within Slack is really really handy. Guru had an Integration with Slack and can be used to search your Knowledgebase, add articles from conversations or channels and ask questions (if you’re in a team or using it company wide) Its a slick easy to use system which integrates seamlessly into Slack

Read Later

There are plenty of systems which will do this for you, pocket is the obvious choice. You find an aritical on line, on the train, something which you’d like to give a bit more time to but can’t right now. I forward the artical to the appropriate channel in Slack, i’ve got channels for Read — Howto, Read — Review, Read — Article etc and just shart the artical from my mobile device or mac tothe channel to read later.

This has been useful when i’ve wanted to find an article as well, again, being able to search so well in Slack makes this much easier.

Evernote Integration

This is soft of linked to Read Later as some articles I like to also Archive to Evernote for a different purpose, using the Evernote integration this is easy and using IFTTT I can do this with Triggers.

PandoraFMS for Events

Much like Papertrail, I use Pandora FMS for event alerts on my Home network, and these alerst can, with the ability to follow some instructions and webhooks Events i should care about can again, be posted to a Pandora FMS channel.

https://blog.pandorafms.org/integrating-slack-with-pandora-fms/

BitBucket Notifications

Becuase I keep my configs for Puppet in bitbucket, and just because I could, i setup Bitbucket to notify Slack whenever a change was made on a config in Bitbucket. As there is one of me this is a bit pointless however in teams this could be useful knowing when code has been commited or a git pull made

IFTTT

IFTTT seemed to be an abouse thing to enable for linking applications together and I have a tendancy where possible to setup IFTTT integrations with slack just to see how they work. The longest used one is posting the XKCD dailty to slack.

Still to do..

This is a journey of discovery really, and won’t stop, i keep wondering what can I push to Slack?

Puppet Reporting seems an obvious choice and there do seem to be several ways to do this on Puppet forge, knowing in Slack if a device isn’t working as expected in puppet could be handy.

Triggering events on Slack Events would be another one, if i see a service has stopped on a server which I have a config for in Bitbucket, maybe use IFTTT to perform a git push of the config file if Slack gets a Papertrail or Pandora message saying there is a problem, or restarting a service if both services see a service has stopped..

Again, critisise, tell me i’m stupid, its a waste of time if you feel you must.. Its just one persons workflow, if you don’t think it works for you, thats great, see you next time.. :-)