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How to trigger Slack notifications as a Validation Action

This guide will help you trigger Slack notifications as a Validation Action. It will allow you to send a Slack message including information about a Validation Result, including whether or not the Validation succeeded.

Great Expectations is able to use a slack webhook or slack app to send notifications.

For webhook#

Prerequisites: This how-to guide assumes you have:
  • Completed the Getting Started Tutorial
  • Have a working installation of Great Expectations
  • Configured a Slack app with the Webhook function enabled (See Additional Resources below for more information on setting up a new Slack app).
  • Obtained the Webhook address for your Slack app.
  • Identified the Slack channel that messages will be sent to.

For slack app#

Prerequisites: This how-to guide assumes you have:
  • Completed the Getting Started Tutorial
  • Have a working installation of Great Expectations
  • Configure a Slack app with a Bot Token (See Additional Resources below for more information on setting up a new Slack app)
  • Obtain the Bot Token for your Slack app.
  • Identified the Slack channel that the messages will be sent to.

Steps#

  1. Open uncommitted/config_variables.yml file and add validation_notification_slack_webhook variable by adding the following line:
validation_notification_slack_webhook: [address to web hook]
  1. Open great_expectations.yml and add send_slack_notification_on_validation_result action to validation_operators. Make sure the following section exists in the great_expectations.yml file.

Webhook config#

validation_operators:    action_list_operator:        # To learn how to configure sending Slack notifications during evaluation        # (and other customizations), read: https://docs.greatexpectations.io/docs/guides/validation/validation_actions/how_to_trigger_slack_notifications_as_a_validation_action/#webhook-config        class_name: ActionListValidationOperator        action_list:        #--------------------------------        # here is what you will be adding        #--------------------------------        - name: send_slack_notification_on_validation_result # name can be set to any value          action:            class_name: SlackNotificationAction            # put the actual webhook URL in the uncommitted/config_variables.yml file            slack_webhook: ${validation_notification_slack_webhook}            notify_on: all # possible values: "all", "failure", "success"            notify_with: # optional list containing the DataDocs sites to include in the notification. Defaults to including links to all configured sites.            renderer:              module_name: great_expectations.render.renderer.slack_renderer              class_name: SlackRenderer

Slack bot config#

validation_operators:    action_list_operator:        # To learn how to configure sending Slack notifications during evaluation        # (and other customizations), read: https://docs.greatexpectations.io/docs/guides/validation/validation_actions/how_to_trigger_slack_notifications_as_a_validation_action/#slack-bot-config        class_name: ActionListValidationOperator        action_list:        #--------------------------------        # here is what you will be adding        #--------------------------------        - name: send_slack_notification_on_validation_result # name can be set to any value          action:            class_name: SlackNotificationAction            # put the actual bot token in the uncommitted/config_variables.yml file            slack_token: {bot_token}            slack_channel: <channel-name>            notify_on: all # possible values: "all", "failure", "success"            notify_with: # optional list containing the DataDocs sites to include in the notification. Defaults to including links to all configured sites.            renderer:              module_name: great_expectations.render.renderer.slack_renderer              class_name: SlackRenderer
  1. Run your action_list_operator, to validate a batch of data and receive Slack notification on the success or failure of validation suite. 
context.run_validation_operator('action_list_operator', assets_to_validate=batch, run_name="slack_test")

If successful, you should receive a Slack message that looks like this:

slack_notification_example

Additional notes#

  • If your great_expectations.yml contains multiple configurations for Data Docs sites, all of them will be included in the Slack notification by default. If you would like to be more specific, you can configure the notify_with variable in your great_expectations.yml.
  • The following example will configure the Slack message to include links Data Docs at local_site and s3_site.
    # Example data_docs_sites configuration    data_docs_sites:      local_site:        class_name: SiteBuilder        show_how_to_buttons: true        store_backend:          class_name: TupleFilesystemStoreBackend          base_directory: uncommitted/data_docs/local_site/        site_index_builder:          class_name: DefaultSiteIndexBuilder      s3_site:  # this is a user-selected name - you may select your own        class_name: SiteBuilder        store_backend:          class_name: TupleS3StoreBackend          bucket: data-docs.my_org  # UPDATE the bucket name here to match the bucket you configured above.        site_index_builder:          class_name: DefaultSiteIndexBuilder          show_cta_footer: true
    validation_operators:        action_list_operator:        ...        - name: send_slack_notification_on_validation_result # name can be set to any value              action:                class_name: SlackNotificationAction                # put the actual webhook URL in the uncommitted/config_variables.yml file                slack_webhook: ${validation_notification_slack_webhook}                notify_on: all # possible values: "all", "failure", "success"                #--------------------------------                # This is what was configured                #--------------------------------                notify_with:                  - local_site                  - s3_site                renderer:                  module_name: great_expectations.render.renderer.slack_renderer                  class_name: SlackRenderer

Additional resources#

  • Instructions on how to set up a Slack app with webhook can be found in the documentation for the Slack API