Stackdriver to Slack markdown formatting for links

[Jeff Sisson]

When you configure documentation for an alert to include markdown that doesn't align with Slack's flavor of markdown, this is passed thru to Slack as plain text. The place where this leads to the most awkwardness is really long links — you can do "[link text](url)" and it will show up correctly in Stackdriver, but it will show up as raw unformatted text in Slack, which makes it hard to read for links to something like GCP/Stackdriver Logging links, which are a million miles long :)

Is there a way to get links like these to show up in Slack in a more formatted way?

[Mary Koes]

+Rory Petty leads alerting and notifications and may have some thoughts...

On Wed, May 22, 2019 at 1:29 PM Jeff Sisson <jeff....@nytimes.com> wrote:

When you configure documentation for an alert to include markdown that doesn't align with Slack's flavor of markdown, this is passed thru to Slack as plain text. The place where this leads to the most awkwardness is really long links — you can do "[link text](url)" and it will show up correctly in Stackdriver, but it will show up as raw unformatted text in Slack, which makes it hard to read for links to something like GCP/Stackdriver Logging links, which are a million miles long :)

Is there a way to get links like these to show up in Slack in a more formatted way?

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[Rory Petty]

Slack uses their own flavor of Markdown which is why your links are not resolving. I'm not sure how they format our inbound Markup text, but try this format:

<http://someurl|like this>

See:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36294962/slack-markdown-for-links-are-not-resolving

https://api.slack.com/docs/message-formatting

https://chris-prener.github.io/SSDSBook/markdown-in-slack.html

+Michael Safyan +Bill Mcelroy to see if we need to set "mrkdwn": true in our JSON to Slack.

[Michael Safyan]

The feedback that the markdown documentation ought to be auto-converted from our version of markdown to the version that Slack supports or that our invocation of Slack ought to preserve the markdown formatting by some other means such as indicating to Slack that the payload is in markdown seems like a reasonable piece of feedback. Thanks for raising this issue, Jeff! In terms of figuring out where to put this on our road map, prioritization, etc. are the workarounds that Rory linked to sufficient for the time being? How pressing would you consider this feature vs other features? Rory, we can follow-up internally regarding implementation specifics and estimates of what this would entail.

Michael Safyan Senior Software Engineer · Stackdriver Monitoring 6425 Penn Ave 7th Floor; Pittsburgh, PA 15206 http://www.michaelsafyan.com | michae...@google.com

[Jeff Sisson]

I was able to use the Slack-compatible link markup (e.g. <url|text>) successfully! So it’s definitely not pressing…kind of just a gotcha for people who mainly consume alerts from Slack.

This is off-topic, but the main reason we’re desperate for these better formatted versions of long links is because log-based metrics don’t pass thru any jump links for the underlying log condition that triggered the error, which means we have to manually put them in the documentation…so if I was making suggestions as to features that would be useful to our team, I’d put that much higher than Slack markdown friendliness :)

[Michael Safyan]

Thanks, that is super, super helpful. We've gotten many requests from customers along the lines of wanting logs to be included in messages triggered from logs-based metrics. Knowing that will definitely help us in figuring out our roadmap. 

Michael Safyan Senior Software Engineer · Stackdriver Monitoring 6425 Penn Ave 7th Floor; Pittsburgh, PA 15206 http://www.michaelsafyan.com | michae...@google.com