Setting up Slack Integration

Support
#1

Good afternoon Redash Support community

Our company has been using your products to help us visualise information from our database storage in a cloud relational-databse product. Redash has been doing well with our in-browser use and has given us many useful insights, but we would like to look at integrating the Redash application into our Slack as we see more of our analysts and some engineers use it.

To that end, we are using the same information from the locally hosted instance of Redash on our cloud-providers’ servers, and have set the Redash Slack Integration up within a freshly-made testing slack workspace with the requested information of a:

[1] Workspace URL = (https://redash.company.domain)

Also, [For the purposes of this post, all * = /] (Otherwise, I get a “disallowed” error about a number of links(!) in this post.)

[2] API Key from *users*me#apiKey - AaAaaA0aAa0A0a0AaaaaaAAaAa0AA0aaa00A0a0a (preserving the uppercaselowercase, letternumber distinction of my account’s key)

And whether or not I regenerate my API key immediately after the configuration or not, I still receive nothing past One moment, bringing preview of: (Workspace URL)*queries*1430. for the command /redash (Workspace URL)*queries*1430 and again, no visualisation results from the bot at all after pasting a link, such as (Workspace URL)*queries*1430, into a channel.

Similarly, looking for the query by the name of the query, such as the command /redash query name from the title bar of my query' only shows me a never resolved error OK, looking for a query that matches - query name from the title bar of my query.`

This holds true whether I do it as the workspace owner, or a second account I created as a workspace user in Slack, and after I have added the Redash bot to the channel in question (thanks to Jesse of Redash for suggesting this – but it unfortunately did not fix the issue).

As this doesn’t match what your documentation implies from the previously linked page, we would like to ask for clarification into the following details.

(1) Do the permissions scoped to this bot look correct? (Attaching two images.)
Should these permissions be changed at all to improve the bot’s integration?

Redash Permissions in Test Slack Workspace
Redash Permissions in Test Slack Workspace960×800 69.6 KB

Redash Application Settings in Test Slack Workspace
Redash Application Settings in Test Slack Workspace2710×1360 237 KB

(2) Does the API key need to be an active API key? Does it need to be of a certain user in Redash, such as one with administrative access or some other level of permissions?

(3) How is the API key used? Is it to set up the initial integration, or is it employed every time that someone calls the app from then onwards?

(4) Why do the documentation images show redashbot BOT instead of Redash APP? Is this part of the problem I am seeing right now?

(5) Is there any other guidance that could be given to getting the BOT to correctly integrate with our workspace? For now, not being able to integrate it in a cleanly created development environment is a blocker for us to try to integrate the Redash app for Slack to our production Slack workspace.

Would like help from community members and Redash staff members to verify the above. Thank you!

Slack(スラック)でRedashを使用する
#2

Bingo. The official integration is a bot that must be added to channels to function. Have you added the redash bot to your channels?

#3

I wish it was this simple.

Actually, before I posted here, I had emailed the Redash support email (it was rather predictable), and a kind staff member, Jesse, had advised I try the same + if it still fails, to message the Discussion Board. (I wonder if he reads it?) Anyway, that’s why I made the above post.

Unfortunately, that didn’t really fix anything, but you are probably right in noting that it does answer this one question of the five that I had asked.

#4

Jesse here :wave: Yes we direct OSS users to the forum for support as paid support is tied to our hosted platform (app.redash.io).

#5

Regarding your questions, I’m not especially familiar with the slackbot but I’ll do my best:

  1. your permissions look fine
  2. yes the api key must be active. an admin api key is preferable but not strictly required. as long as the api key has access to the queries you want to fetch into Slack then it should work
  3. The slackbot uses the Redash REST API to fetch results. The api key is used for bearer authentication in these requests.
  4. The redash slack integration is a bot not an app.
  5. Sadly the slackbot integration code is ancient and hasn’t received any changes / fixes in several years. The bot was never widely used among our customers and thus became a very low priority. I expect the bot will be rewritten down the line but your guess is as good as mine as to when that will happen.

Which leaves a few options.

  1. If it is possible to make your environment work with the existing slackbot, someone on the forum can hopefully share.
  2. If it is not possible then you can either move along and use a different tool besides Redash or write your own slack integration.
1 Like
#6

Thanks Jesse!

I’ll take this back to our team and we’ll see what we can do in our next steps.