One of the features offered by Jamf Pro is the ability to send notifications of various events to specified email addresses. Any Jamf Pro user account can be set up to receive these emails, so they’re a convenient way to be notified about events affecting your Jamf Pro service.
These notifications include the following:
- An instance of the Jamf Pro web application in a clustered environment fails
- An updated patch reporting software title is available
- Computer is enrolled using PreStage
- Database backup fails
- Database backup succeeds
- Error occurs during imaging
- Error occurs when policy runs
- Jamf Pro account is locked out because of excessive failed log in attempts
- Jamf Pro fails to add file to JDS instance or cloud distribution point
- License limit is exceeded
- One or more Memcached Endpoint(s) are not reachable
- Restricted software violation occurs
- Smart computer group membership changes
- Smart mobile device group membership changes
- Smart user group membership changes
- SSL certificate verification is disabled
- Tomcat is started or stopped
- VPP token is approaching expiration date
That said, I get enough emails on a daily basis that I’d prefer to have these notifications go to a channel in Slack. That way, my whole team can be notified about issues and there’s a searchable log of when events occurred.
There are solutions for sending notifications directly to Slack, but I wanted to avoid using middleware in favor of using the built-in notifications in Jamf Pro. Fortunately, there’s a way to do that using tools available from Slack. For more details, see below the jump.
As part of its paid plans, Slack includes an app integration called Email. This Slack app will give you an email address to send to and allow you to select a channel where the emails should appear.
As an example, you may want to set up a channel in your team’s Slack instance named #jamfpro-notifications and then configure the Email app so that it provides an email address associated with the #jamfpro-notifications channel.
Any emails sent to the specified address would appear in the #jamfpro-notifications channel. You can also configure a specific icon to be associated with the posted messages.
Once you have the Slack email address, you can then set up a local user in Jamf Pro to send the notifications. This user account can have no account privileges at all, as no privileges are needed to receive email notifications. To set up the user, please use the procedure below:
1. Log into your Jamf Pro server using an account with administrator rights.
2. Go into Management: System Settings: Jamf Pro User Accounts & Groups
3. Click the New button.
4. Select Create Standard Account and click the Next button.
5. Set up a new account, with the email address from Slack as the account’s email address.
Note: No account privileges need to be assigned to this account.
6. Once the new account has been set up and configured as desired, click the Save button.
7. Log out of your Jamf Pro admin account and log into the newly-created account.
8. If no privileges were set for the account, verify that everything is coming up as Access Denied.
9. Click the account drop-down menu and select Notifications.
10. Select your desired notification options. Once finished, click the Save button.
11. Log out of Jamf Pro.
Once that this has been configured, you can go to your Slack channel and see the notifications appear.
