Alerts and Destinations

This guide will walk you through creating an alert and receiving alert deliveries to a destination in the Orbit web app.

🚧 Beta Feature
Alerts and Destinations are currently in beta and subject to change. Please refer to this guide for the latest changes. Join our beta program for access.

Overview

Using alerts and destinations, you can configure many alerts with filters for triggering and receiving alert deliveries. When an activity occurs that matches the alert filters, we will attempt to deliver the activity to any specified destinations. Webhooks and Slack are the two destinations available today.

Alerts and destinations work in tandem. In this guide, we’ll start by creating a destination. We’ll then configure an alert to be delivered to the destination.

Destinations

A destination is where to send data when an activity occurs in Orbit. Right now, we support the following destination types:

• Webhooks
• Slack

Destinations have a few common fields, such as a descriptive name, in addition to configuration specific to each type (e.g. URL for webhooks, channel for Slack).

Creating a destination

To create a new destination, navigate to the “Settings” section from the side navigation and click the “Destinations” link:

In this example, we’ll walk through setting up a webhook. Click the “New Destination” button and choose the “Webhook” destination type from the dropdown:

The name of your destination should be descriptive, and help you and your team understand where the alert is going and how it'll be used. In the Orbit app, the name will help you differentiate between all the destinations you’ve created in your workspace.

Next, add any required configuration such as Webhook URL and a secret, if required, and click the “Create” button:

Your destination should now be created. You can now attach the destination to alerts and begin receiving alert deliveries!

What happens if Orbit can’t reach a destination?

In the event of repeated failures, we will automatically disable a destination after three unsuccessful alert delivery attempts.

To receive alert deliveries for a disabled destination again, you must manually toggle the “Enabled” field and ensure the alert delivery is successful.

Alerts

An alert is comprised of three parts:

• A descriptive name
• Filters to narrow trigger criteria
• Destinations to send deliveries

Right now, we support these activity types:

Filters

When you create an alert, you have the option to provide filters. By default, any activity creation will trigger an alert. To narrow the criteria down, you can provide filters. Right now, we support the following filters:

• Activity Types
• Activity Tags
• Member Tags

As you can imagine, alert filtering is both flexible and powerful. Depending on your workflow, here's some examples:

• Alert when any member stars a specific repository
• Alert when pull request is opened or merged by a member tagged Ambassador
• Alert when a virtual meetup is attended by a member tagged Paris or JavaScript

Creating an alert

To create a new alert, navigate from the side navigation and click the “Settings” link and then choose “Alerts”:

Add a descriptive name for the alert. Next, provide any specific filters. You can combine multiple filters, e.g. "Member tags include sf OR paris". Finally, choose the destinations to send alert deliveries and click the “Create” button:

Your alert should now be created. You can now begin receiving alert deliveries when an activity is created that matches your alert filters!

Summary

That's it! You’ve successfully created a new alert that can send alert deliveries to multiple destinations. Depending on your workflow, here’s a couple alert suggestions you may find useful:

Send an alert delivery when...

• An ambassador opens or merges a pull request
• A new repository gets any new stargazers
• A member tagged vip does any activity
• Firehose: any activity by any member!

Feedback

Alerts and Destinations are currently in beta. We would love to hear more about your workflow. Please feel free to reach out with any feedback on the feature.