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Apologies for hijacking the thread, but I'm wondering: We're using Campfire right now, with the Propane mac client, and we have a dedicated room for notificati

Apologies for hijacking the thread, but I'm wondering: We're using Campfire right now, with the Propane mac client, and we have a dedicated room for notifications (currently exceptions from Errbit, monitoring alerts from Nagios, CI build failures on Jenkins, app deployments from our own custom tools). It works pretty well, but we're a team working on a whole bunch of unrelated but overlapping apps, and having everything in a single room is getting to be very messy, and at times the Propane icon is bouncing almost continuously. And Propane doesn't support controlling when to notify me when there are new unread messages, so I have no way of filtering out the noise. Splitting out into multiple rooms is not a workable solution as the "spheres of interest" are not mutually exclusive. I'm curious if anyone is using Campfire or some other tool in a similar way, or if HipChat could solve the problem (on first glance it looks fairly simplistic). Email doesn't cut it and direct IM through some bot is not really an option. A dedicated notification app/gateway seems like a better fit, but I haven't found one since Notifio folded.

pbiggar 14y ago
We send all these messages into hipchat. I have it set so I don't get notified for messages, only for messages directed to me (using "@pbiggar")
- lobster_johnson 14y ago
  And so you have set up Nagios and whatever to always include the appropriate recipients in the messages? Where do you centralize the information about who should be @-mentioned? Edit: Seems like a lot of noise if there are a lot of recipients (some of our apps or libs have 8+ people).
  - pbiggar 14y ago
    We dont do that at all, though I'm 90% sure the hipchat API supports that. What I meant was, when a team member wants to contact me personally, they put @pbiggar in front, and Hipchat will give me a notification for that, but not all the other messages.
    - lobster_johnson 14y ago
      Yes, Campfire likes that, too. I'm talking about automated messages, though. What I'd like is to have a list of project names I am interested in, let the bots use the project names in their messages, and then have the client ping me when something interesting is mentioned. Propane has custom mention support where you can enter a bunch of strings, but it doesn't really work.
      - rajivm 14y ago
        Use different rooms (with relavent people in each room), or make your bot smarter (we do both). You could easily make it so a given user could 'subscribe' to a project by sending a message to the bot. i.e. '@companybot subcribe xyz-service'. Then have the bot keep track of those and automatically at-message the interested people upon failures etc. IMO opinion, different rooms are still better, because it brings everyone together when there's an issue also, but it depends how large an organization you have.
        lobster_johnson 14y ago
        We don't have a bot. Every service that does notification uses the native plugin to do so; Errbit has a Campfire plugin, Jenkins has one, etc. While we could possibly write a custom bot that centralized everything and tied all the services together, that is going to be a fair amount of work for something that ought to exist already.
  - plasma 14y ago
    HipChat has the concept of a "notify" flag for every message you send via the API. Notified messages make a ding sound in chat, flash the task bar, etc. For my HipChat setup, build logs are silent (and don't disturb anyone), but a notification that a deployment failed has the "notify" flag set to gain everyone's attention.
    - lobster_johnson 14y ago
      Sure, I get that. But what if a deployment failed for an app that you are not interested in (because you're not working on it) and don't want notification about it?
      - rajivm 14y ago
        You have the notification goto the room for the relavent Team/Project. Then only people who are in those rooms (even when offline!) get those notifications.
        lobster_johnson 14y ago
        As I said, I work on about 8 codebases concurrently (shared across just two or three projects). I can't have 8 chat rooms open, that's just silly. Every time I want to find a window I will have to cycle through them.
        xymostech 14y ago
        "I can't have 8 chat rooms open, that's just silly" Why is that silly? Why would messages about all 8 projects be going into the same space? Shouldn't they be separated? That's exactly how we filter out all the different messages. And Hipchat has shortcuts to switch between different rooms, and highlights rooms that have new messages. Works pretty well, from my experience.
        lobster_johnson 14y ago
        Do you have your email program open with 8 different mailboxes, one for each project you want to receive communications about? I doubt you do. Notifications like these are conceptually a queue of stuff that requires your attention. There is no point in separate notifications into multiple queues, they are all equally important. If project A is throwing a fit, it doesn't matter if I'm currently working on project B, it needs my attention. I don't know Hipchat, but with Campfire and Propane, each chat is designed to be in a separate window/tab. If you bury the room behind a kind of modal selector (as seems to be the case, there's a sidebar with each room?), that's really no better. After all, if I've focused project A and project B starts blinking, I need to switch there. That's an unnecessary switch when all I want is a queue of items to read. (And no, email is way too heavy for this, and I don't want it interleaved with my regular email. We used to use email, those were bad times.) It's not unusual for all projects to have incidents during a day, whether it be deployment information, exceptions or monitoring alerts.
holman 14y ago
We pipe everything into Campfire, scoped into the relevant room (last time I checked we had about 80 separate rooms). The topical bit is important- a particular app's notifications get dumped into that app's room, for example. That means I only get notified if I'm in that room. Conversely, that means I don't get excessive notifications if I'm not in the room, for apps I'm not interested in. "Spheres of interest", as you mention them, become less important as you grow the company. We've found it important to not get too sucked into every little aspect of the company- it's too broad. If someone thinks you should know something that's happening in a room you're not in, they can just ping you and you can hop in and stay up-to-date. That's been a really good solution for us.
- lobster_johnson 14y ago
  80 rooms? Ouch. I work on about 8 projects I need notifications for while I'm at work. I can't have 8 rooms open. That's just too much.
  - holman 14y ago
    Of those 80, I regularly only keep about five open, and of those there's only three or four that I watch closely. Opt-in to your activity.

pbiggar 14y ago

We send all these messages into hipchat. I have it set so I don't get notified for messages, only for messages directed to me (using "@pbiggar")

lobster_johnson 14y ago
And so you have set up Nagios and whatever to always include the appropriate recipients in the messages? Where do you centralize the information about who should be @-mentioned? Edit: Seems like a lot of noise if there are a lot of recipients (some of our apps or libs have 8+ people).
- pbiggar 14y ago
  We dont do that at all, though I'm 90% sure the hipchat API supports that. What I meant was, when a team member wants to contact me personally, they put @pbiggar in front, and Hipchat will give me a notification for that, but not all the other messages.
  - lobster_johnson 14y ago
    Yes, Campfire likes that, too. I'm talking about automated messages, though. What I'd like is to have a list of project names I am interested in, let the bots use the project names in their messages, and then have the client ping me when something interesting is mentioned. Propane has custom mention support where you can enter a bunch of strings, but it doesn't really work.
    - rajivm 14y ago
      Use different rooms (with relavent people in each room), or make your bot smarter (we do both). You could easily make it so a given user could 'subscribe' to a project by sending a message to the bot. i.e. '@companybot subcribe xyz-service'. Then have the bot keep track of those and automatically at-message the interested people upon failures etc. IMO opinion, different rooms are still better, because it brings everyone together when there's an issue also, but it depends how large an organization you have.
      - lobster_johnson 14y ago
        We don't have a bot. Every service that does notification uses the native plugin to do so; Errbit has a Campfire plugin, Jenkins has one, etc. While we could possibly write a custom bot that centralized everything and tied all the services together, that is going to be a fair amount of work for something that ought to exist already.
- plasma 14y ago
  HipChat has the concept of a "notify" flag for every message you send via the API. Notified messages make a ding sound in chat, flash the task bar, etc. For my HipChat setup, build logs are silent (and don't disturb anyone), but a notification that a deployment failed has the "notify" flag set to gain everyone's attention.
  - lobster_johnson 14y ago
    Sure, I get that. But what if a deployment failed for an app that you are not interested in (because you're not working on it) and don't want notification about it?
    - rajivm 14y ago
      You have the notification goto the room for the relavent Team/Project. Then only people who are in those rooms (even when offline!) get those notifications.
      - lobster_johnson 14y ago
        As I said, I work on about 8 codebases concurrently (shared across just two or three projects). I can't have 8 chat rooms open, that's just silly. Every time I want to find a window I will have to cycle through them.
        xymostech 14y ago
        "I can't have 8 chat rooms open, that's just silly" Why is that silly? Why would messages about all 8 projects be going into the same space? Shouldn't they be separated? That's exactly how we filter out all the different messages. And Hipchat has shortcuts to switch between different rooms, and highlights rooms that have new messages. Works pretty well, from my experience.
        lobster_johnson 14y ago
        Do you have your email program open with 8 different mailboxes, one for each project you want to receive communications about? I doubt you do. Notifications like these are conceptually a queue of stuff that requires your attention. There is no point in separate notifications into multiple queues, they are all equally important. If project A is throwing a fit, it doesn't matter if I'm currently working on project B, it needs my attention. I don't know Hipchat, but with Campfire and Propane, each chat is designed to be in a separate window/tab. If you bury the room behind a kind of modal selector (as seems to be the case, there's a sidebar with each room?), that's really no better. After all, if I've focused project A and project B starts blinking, I need to switch there. That's an unnecessary switch when all I want is a queue of items to read. (And no, email is way too heavy for this, and I don't want it interleaved with my regular email. We used to use email, those were bad times.) It's not unusual for all projects to have incidents during a day, whether it be deployment information, exceptions or monitoring alerts.

holman 14y ago

We pipe everything into Campfire, scoped into the relevant room (last time I checked we had about 80 separate rooms). The topical bit is important- a particular app's notifications get dumped into that app's room, for example. That means I only get notified if I'm in that room. Conversely, that means I don't get excessive notifications if I'm not in the room, for apps I'm not interested in. "Spheres of interest", as you mention them, become less important as you grow the company. We've found it important to not get too sucked into every little aspect of the company- it's too broad. If someone thinks you should know something that's happening in a room you're not in, they can just ping you and you can hop in and stay up-to-date. That's been a really good solution for us.

lobster_johnson 14y ago
80 rooms? Ouch. I work on about 8 projects I need notifications for while I'm at work. I can't have 8 rooms open. That's just too much.
- holman 14y ago
  Of those 80, I regularly only keep about five open, and of those there's only three or four that I watch closely. Opt-in to your activity.