# Setup Notifications

When operating a cluster, different teams may wish to receive notifications about
the status of their GitOps pipelines.
For example, the on-call team would receive alerts about reconciliation
failures in the cluster, while the dev team may wish to be alerted when a new version 
of an app was deployed and if the deployment is healthy.

## Prerequisites

* [Get started guide](../get-started/index.md)

The GitOps toolkit controllers emit Kubernetes events whenever a resource status changes.
You can use the [notification-controller](../components/notification/controller.md)
to forward these events to Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord or Rocket chart.
The notification controller is part of the default toolkit installation.

## Define a provider

First create a secret with your Slack incoming webhook:

```sh
kubectl -n gitops-system create secret generic slack-url \
--from-literal=address=https://hooks.slack.com/services/YOUR/SLACK/WEBHOOK
```

Note that the secret must contain an `address` field,
it can be a Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord or Rocket webhook URL.

Create a notification provider for Slack by referencing the above secret:

```yaml
apiVersion: notification.fluxcd.io/v1alpha1
kind: Provider
metadata:
  name: slack
  namespace: gitops-system
spec:
  type: slack
  channel: general
  secretRef:
    name: slack-url
```

The provider type can be `slack`, `msteams`, `discord`, `rocket` or `generic`.

When type `generic` is specified, the notification controller will post the incoming
[event](../components/notification/event.md) in JSON format to the webhook address. 
This way you can create custom handlers that can store the events in 
Elasticsearch, CloudWatch, Stackdriver, etc.

## Define an alert

Create an alert definition for all repositories and kustomizations:

```yaml
apiVersion: notification.fluxcd.io/v1alpha1
kind: Alert
metadata:
  name: on-call-webapp
  namespace: gitops-system
spec:
  providerRef: 
    name: slack
  eventSeverity: info
  eventSources:
    - kind: GitRepository
      name: '*'
    - kind: Kustomization
      name: '*'
```

Apply the above files or commit them to the `fleet-infra` repository.

To verify that the alert has been acknowledge by the notification controller do:

```console
$ kubectl -n gitops-system get alerts

NAME             READY   STATUS        AGE
on-call-webapp   True    Initialized   1m
```

Multiple alerts can be used to send notifications to different channels or Slack organizations.

The event severity can be set to `info` or `error`.
When the severity is set to `error`, the kustomize controller will alert on any error
encountered during the reconciliation process.
This includes kustomize build and validation errors,
apply errors and health check failures.

![error alert](../diagrams/slack-error-alert.png)

When the verbosity is set to `info`, the controller will alert if:

* a Kubernetes object was created, updated or deleted
* heath checks are passing
* a dependency is delaying the execution
* an error occurs

![info alert](../diagrams/slack-info-alert.png)