How to connect CluedIn to Slack for alerts

CluedIn → Slack Alerts: End-to-End Setup Guide

This walkthrough shows two supported patterns for getting data quality and master data (MDM) alerts from CluedIn into Slack channels:

  • Option A (Fastest): Post alerts to Slack with an Incoming Webhook
  • Option B (Flexible/Recommended): Use a Slack App (bot) with fine-grained permissions, per-channel routing, threads, and richer formatting

Both options include examples for Data Quality (DQ) and Master Data (MDM) events, plus testing, routing, and troubleshooting.

Prerequisites

  • CluedIn: Access to Alerts/Workflows (or Webhooks/Integrations), and permissions to configure environment variables/secret store.
  • Slack: Workspace admin rights (to create/manage apps) and permission to install apps in target channels.
  • Network/Security: Allow outbound HTTPS from CluedIn to Slack endpoints.

Terminology

  • DQ Alert: Triggers when rules/thresholds fail (e.g., completeness < 98%, schema drift, dedupe conflicts, pipeline errors).
  • MDM Alert: Triggers on golden record lifecycle events (create/update/merge/survivorship changes, source conflict).
  • Routing: Logic that picks a Slack channel per alert (by domain, severity, or entity type).
  • Block Kit: Slack’s JSON format for rich messages.

Option A — Incoming Webhook (Fastest Path)

Great for simple “send this alert to #data-quality” use cases.

1) Create a Slack Incoming Webhook

  1. Go to https://api.slack.com/apps → Create New App → “From scratch”.
  2. App name: CluedIn Alerts, Workspace: your workspace.
  3. In Incoming Webhooks, Activate webhooks.
  4. Add New Webhook to Workspace, choose a default channel (e.g., #data-quality), then copy the Webhook URL (looks like https://hooks.slack.com/services/T...).

2) Store the Webhook URL in CluedIn

  • Put the webhook URL in CluedIn Secrets/Key Vault: SLACK_WEBHOOK_DQ (for DQ) and/or SLACK_WEBHOOK_MDM (for MDM).
    You can reuse one URL or keep per-channel secrets.

3) Create/Adjust CluedIn Alert Rules

  • DQ Examples:
    • Completeness < 98% for Customer
    • New Schema Drift detected for Product (new column, type change)
    • Deduplication conflict rate > threshold
    • Pipeline job failure (ingestion/enrichment/curation)
  • MDM Examples:
    • Golden Record created (Customer)
    • Survivorship rule changed attribute owner/priority
    • Merge/Split events
    • Upstream conflict on key attribute (email, legal name, VAT)

4) Add a “Send to Slack (Webhook)” Workflow Step

  • For each alert rule, add an action that POSTs to the webhook URL with a Block Kit payload.

Minimal payload (JSON): ```json { “text”: “CluedIn Alert”, “blocks”: [ { “type”: “header”, “text”: { “type”: “plain_text”, “text”: “🚨 Data Quality Alert” } }, { “type”: “section”, “fields”: [ { “type”: “mrkdwn”, “text”: “Domain:\nCustomer” }, { “type”: “mrkdwn”, “text”: “Severity:\nHigh” } ]}, { “type”: “section”, “text”: { “type”: “mrkdwn”, “text”: “Rule: Completeness < 98%\nScore: 96.2%\nRecords impacted: 1,283” } }, { “type”: “context”, “elements”: [ { “type”: “mrkdwn”, “text”: “Run ID: 2025-08-24T03:45Z • Env: prod” } ] } ] }