This guide outlines the steps to create a Slack app and configure it to communicate with your Validio installation. These steps are a prerequisite for setting up a Validio notification channel for Slack. For more information, see the Slack integration.

You will need to complete the following steps before you can create a notification channel to send messages and alerts from Validio to your Slack workspace:

1. Create a Slack app for Validio
2. Generate tokens and scopes
3. Invite the app to your channels

Create a Slack app for Validio

In your App Management dashboard,

1. Click Create New App and Create an app from scratch.
2. Give your app a name and assign it to your Slack workspace.

You will use authentication and app credentials from the created app to set up a Slack notification channel within Validio. This enables Validio to send messages to any configured Slack channels and process user interactions on those messages (such as muting incidents from Slack).

For more information, see Slack documentation on creating a new Slack app.

Generate Tokens and Scopes

Slack uses scopes to give your app permissions to perform actions, such as posting messages to your workspace. When you create tokens, you need to make sure that tokens have the appropriate scopes assigned to them. You will need to create two tokes: an app-level token and a bot token.

App-Level Token

App-level tokens require "Socket Mode" to be enabled for the app. For new Slack notification channels, use the following steps to create enable Socket Mode and create new app-level tokens. To migrate existing Slack notification channels to use Socket Mode, see Migrating Slack App to Socket Mode.

To create a new app-level token in your App Management Dashboard,

1. If socket mode is not enabled in your app, navigate to Settings > Socket Mode > Connect using Socket Mode to enable the feature. After you enable socket mode, Slack will prompt you to create a new app-level token. Continue to Step 3.
2. If socket mode is already enabled, and you need to create a new app-level token, navigate to Settings > Basic Information > App-Level Tokens and click Generate Token and Scopes.

3. Enter a Token Name.
4. If there are no scopes assigned to the token, click Add Scope and add connections:write.
5. Click Generate. App-level tokens contain the following prefix in their string: xapp-
6. Copy and save this token to configure the Slack notification channel in Validio.

Bot User OAuth Token and Scopes

The bot token is a user OAuth token that will be automatically generated when you install your app to your workspace. Before you create the bot token, you need to first assign it the appropriate scopes. For more information, see Slack documentation on assigning scopes to an app and installing an app to a workspace.

You can find the bot token and scopes settings in your App Management dashboard under Features > OAuth & Permissions.

To create a new bot token,

1. Under Scopes > Bot Token Scopes, add the following OAuth scopes for your bot token:

2. Under OAuth Tokens, click the button to install the app to your workspace and automatically generate the bot token.

3. Review the access request to your workspace and click Allow.

   When the bot token is generated, you will see it under Bot User OAuth Token. Bot tokens contain the following prefix in their string: xoxb-

4. Copy and save this token to configure the Slack notification channel in Validio.

Invite the App to Channels

To allow the app to post messages, invite the installed app to any relevant Slack channels where you want to route incident notifications from Validio.

Configure a Validio Notification Channel for Slack

After you set up your Slack app for Validio, you can create a Validio notification channel to communicate with the Slack app and send messages and alerts to your workspaces and channels in Slack. For more information, see steps for configuring a Validio Notification Channel for Slack.