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Try this AppDynamics/Webex Teams Mashup
What is great about Cisco Webex Teams is that I can start working on the desktop client and pick up where I left off when I go mobile via my iOS or Android client. Since both the desktop and mobile clients support notifications, I never have to worry about receiving an important message from a team that I’m collaborating with. In addition to these benefits, there are a number of API’s that allow you to create bots to enhance your workflows.
Recently I’ve had the opportunity to get to work with the powerful tools that AppDynamics (AppD) has to offer. In addition to automatically and dynamically mapping out your application flow and providing business transaction scoring and correlation, AppDynamics has a powerful monitoring and alert system. Like other monitoring systems you are able to send out SMS or email alerts based upon various criteria. What is really cool is that the AppDynamics controller can fire HTTP requests at a web server!
Use the Webex Teams APIs to do Really Cool Things
This opens up a variety of use cases where we can take advantage of the Webex Teams API’s to do really cool things! For example, we could develop a Cisco Webex Teams Bot that creates a triage space to start troubleshooting an issue that AppDynamics detects. The bot can also pre-populate the necessary team space members as well as post links/logs and other information necessary to hit the ground running in triaging the issue.
Let’s get started!
Server Restart Meet Triage Bot
I already have AppD monitoring a couple of my own Webex Teams Bots, so let’s setup App Dynamics and a Webex Teams Bot to do the following in case a server I’m monitoring restarts. Here is a high level view of the architecture.
When AppD discovers a restart, I would like the following to happen:
- AppD send an HTTP request to the bot we’ll call AppD Triage Bot. The body of the request should include:
- List of team members to be added to the Webex Teams space
- Issue name and description
- Link to more information on the AppD controller
- Upon receipt of the a valid HTTP request, the AppD Triage Bot will:
- Create the WebEx Teams space
- Populate the space with team members
- Post an informative message to the newly created team space so that the team understands what is going on, and
- Provide a deep link to more relevant information on the AppD controller.
Here is a high-level view of the call flow.
Let’s Go Deeper
In order for the monitor and alert functionality to work on AppDynamics, you need to create a Policy that defines the criteria that you want to monitor and the action that you want to take. In order to do this, log into your controller and click the “Alert & Respond” Tab. Once you are on the “Alert & Respond” Tab, you will want to choose your application from the drop down menu and then click “Policies”. This will take you to a list where you can edit, delete and create new policies.
If you have not already done so, create/add a policy.
Webex Teams Developer Api
The monitoring criteria can be performance metrics, health rules related to business transaction performance or specific events like a server restart. It can really be anything you like. For example, say some of your business transactions start slowing down to unacceptable level. Trigger the alert! For the sake of simplicity, I’ve decided to go with a simple server restart.
In order to take action with an HTTP Request, we first have to define an HTTP Request Template. With the policy and HTTP Request defined for our case, when a server that we are monitoring restarts, the AppD controller will fire an HTTP Request to our AppD Triage Bot.
Creating an HTTP Request Template is fairly straight forward and I’d recommend checking out the documentation for a quick primer. The main things you will need to fill out in the form includes:
- Name of the Template,
- URL of the Triage Bot Web Server,
- Both the “Accept” and “Content-Type” request headers,
- Add your own customer header called **Triage-Auth-Token**. This header is populated with a secret token that should be stored in an environmental variable on your bot server. It is used to authenticate your webhook
- Payload MIME Type, and
- Payload JSON
It is this HTTP Request Payload that we need to customize that will allow us to really differentiate our bot and provide a lot of context to our Webex Teams triage space. The body will be a JSON dictionary that will contain two arrays, defined in the following way:
- An array of team members that the bot will populate the space with, and
- An array of events that have triggered the alert HTTP Request
The team members are pretty easily populated, but how do we get events? Well, fortunately, the gurus at AppD allow scripting of the HTTP Template Request Body via Apache Velocity. In a nutshell, the Apache Velocity Templating language allows us to populate the contents of the request body at alert time so that we have the most up to date contextual information possible.
here is the JSON body snippet for the payload template:
[cc lang=”python” width=”600″ height=”450″]{
“triageEmailList”: [
“superawesomeuser@yourgreatcompany.com”,
“supersupportguy@yourgreatcompany.com”
],
“events”: [
#foreach(${event} in ${fullEventList})
#set( $msg = $event.summaryMessage.replace(“”, “n”) )
{
“app”: “${event.application.name}”,
“appid”: “${event.application.id}”,
“tier”: “${event.tier.name}”,
“node”: “${event.node.name}”,
“time”: “${event.eventTime}”,
“deeplink”: “${event.deepLink}”,
“name”: “${event.displayName}”,
“severity”: “${event.severity}”,
“message”: “${msg}”
}
#if($velocityCount != $fullEventList.size()) , #end
#end
]
}[/cc]
Let’s break it down. The first dictionary entry, triageEmailList, is the list of team members we want to add to the space. The second dictionary entry is the list of events that generated the alert. Velocity allows us to script this into a set of key/value pairs that the Triage Bot can process and build a contextually relevant message for the triage space. As you can see from the listing, we can provide a bunch of information including the specific application name, the name of the alert, it’s severity, alert message info. Most importantly there is a deep link provided that allows the team to immediately start looking into the issue at hand.
When the HTTP Request is fired, the JSON body looks something like this:
The resulting JSON body looks like this:
[cc lang=”python” line_numbers=”True” width=”600″ length=”450″]{
“events”: [
{
“app”: “Super Awesome Spark Bot”,
“appid”: “505”,
“deeplink”:”https://xyz.saas.appdynamics.com/#location=APP_EVENT_VIEWER_MODAL&eventSummary=132914372&application=505″,
“message”: “Proxy was re-started Node: node afc0, Tier: Web Server”,
“name”: “App Server Restart”,
“node”: “node afc0”,
“severity”: “INFO”,
“tier”: “Web Server”,
“time”: “Thu Jan 11 09:51:25 PST 2018”
}
],
“triageEmailList”: [
“superawesomeuser@yourgreatcompany.com”,
“supersupportguy@yourgreatcompany.com”
]
}
[/cc]
Now that we have created the HTTP Template, we need to go back into the Policy we created and assign an action. So go back, edit your policy, select “Actions” and then add the newly created HTTP Template.
The Code
Webex Meetings Api
Now let’s look at the Triage Bot code. It is a simple Python based Flask application that takes the request, parses the JSON payload, and creates the Webex Teams space. So let’s break down the code.
The first part is standard Flask stuff:
[cc lang=”python” width=”600″]
@app.route(‘/appdtriagebot’, methods =[‘POST’])
def triage_room_required():
date_time = dt.datetime.now()
if verify_incoming_request(request):
request_json = request.json
build_triage_room(request_json)
else:
print(“{}, POST request was NOT successfully verified.”.format(date_time))
return “Ok”
if __name__ “__main__”:
app.run(host=’0.0.0.0′)
[/cc]
pretty simple. We take the HTTP request, verify it’s coming from our AppD controller via a token embedded in the request and then fire a function, build_triage_room, that takes the request payload and builds the space. We will do the following:
- Create the WebEx Teams Space with an appropriate name.
- Populate the space with people listed in the *triageEmailList* JSON array in the request payload above, and
- Send a summary of the event that needs triaging to the space. We will want to include an HTML deep link back to the event so that users can dive right in and start troubleshooting.
Now let’s take a look at how we do this in code:
[cc lang=”python” width=”600″ height=”1100″]
def build_triage_room(appd_request_json):
the_url = “https://api.ciscospark.com/v1/rooms”
date_time = dt.datetime.now()
print(“{}, build_triage_room start”.format(date_time))
# Get the event from the request json
event = appd_request_json[‘events’][0]
# Get the app name from the event
app_name = event[‘app’]
# Create the title of the room from the app name we just pulled
message_json = {“title”: “AppD: {} Triage”.format(app_name)}
#Grab our bot_token that we stored in the environment because it’s not a good thing to store it in code.
bot_token = os.environ.get(‘APPD_TRIAGE_BOT_ACCESS_TOKEN’)
# Create the HTTP Post for creating the triage room
message_response = requests.post(the_url, json=message_json, verify=True, headers={‘Authorization’: ‘Bearer {}’.format(bot_token),’Accept’:’application/json’})
# Handle potential errors gracefully. In this case just print something to STDOUT
if message_response.status_code200:
message_response_json = json.loads(message_response.text)
date_time = dt.datetime.now()
print(“{}: Creation of the room was successful”.format(date_time))
# Creating the room was successful. Now we need to populate the room with people necessary to triage it.
#
# First we need the room id of the room we just created.
room_id = message_response_json[‘id’]
date_time = dt.datetime.now()
# We get that list of people from the JSON message.
email_list = appd_request_json[‘triageEmailList’]
populate_spark_room_members(room_id, bot_token, email_list)
# Retrieve the event that caused this and post it as a message to the room
# Post to the room
date_time = dt.datetime.now()
print(“{}: Posting event info to the room”.format(date_time))
events = appd_request_json[‘events’]
populate_spark_room_message(room_id, bot_token, events)
else:
date_time = dt.datetime.now()
print(“{}: failure, received status code: {}”.format(date_time, message_response.status_code))
date_time = dt.datetime.now()
print(“{}, build_triage_room end”.format(date_time))
[/cc]
Here is a screenshot of the finished product!
Conclusion
So, to wrap up, we took two different Cisco products and tied them together to make something greater than the sum of their parts. We utilized AppDynamics alerting and monitoring functionality to trigger a Cisco Webex Teams Bot to:
- Create a Webex Teams space
- Invite a list of participants who are need to root cause and solve the problem
- Post to the space an informative message with a deep link back to the AppD Controller so that the team can dive right in and start troubleshooting.
Hopefully you can see the possibilities that leveraging the AppD functionality and Cisco Webex Teams API’s allow. The code for the bot can be found on the CiscoSE GitHub page. Check it out, give it a try and see if you can embrace and extend it into your own workflows.
Good Luck!
A few months back I had been working on network automation and APIs via DevNet for different technologies and getting certified. I was spending some time exploring Webex Teams, bots, and thinking of use cases for integration. There are some really cool items that can be done for integrations and I began working on some of my custom home monitoring tools, like my garage opener. A Great benefit of using Webex Teams for this was that I didn’t need a separate app on my phone for this.
Then the pandemic happened and life changed – constant news reinforcing our primal fear instincts; groceries in scant supply; schooling issues for our children. I wanted to do something for our team to help keep spirits high.
Using the Webex teams SDK
I realized it would be really easy to create a very simple bot that had a very simple purpose, one positive message for people, every day. It was to be a Webex Teams space without a lot of discussion, just a positive message every day. Using the Webex Teams SDK and a handy Raspberry Pi, this was very easy to get going.
I quickly set up a Webex Teams bot on that Raspberry Pi, created a space, and told a few people about it. A few people invited some other people. Pretty soon we had 50 people and it was officially a “thing”. So I had to take my minimum viable project and improve some of the quotes in the list, which had been scraped from a repository on Github, and was… a good start. It had some cleanup to be done.
This portion of theDailyPositive bot was beneficial to me. While it was a personal project that I did in off hours, picking out good, uplifiting quotes was really positive for keeping mental sanity during this time.
Over the course of four months this slowly expanded, reaching about 180 employees as of August 2020. But I had begun to experience a few operational challenges in sustaining this on my Raspberry Pi, notably a few hangs (likely due to a few other things I had running on it), and during some network upgrades (to support my new office layouts with kids at home), the Raspberry Pi had a few days where it was down. So whether the Pi just got tired, or had lost connection, there were a few times that the daily positive just did not run. I wasn’t feeling so positive about that.
Time to migrate this to the cloud
As I was doing some side integration work with creating some cloud capabilities for Webex Teams use cases, I had already poked in AWS to get some Teams messaging working. I decided for this project to use Google cloud platform so that I could gain exposure to that platform, for which I had another use case (involving Webex Teams).
The 2 key GCP functions to bring this to fruition were the Cloud Scheduler (for Cron like scheduling), and cloud functions. Tying these two items together allowed the function to run on a scheduled basis, similar to how my existing setup worked.
While the migration was pretty straight forward, as with everything, there were some challenges. These were initially ported into a cloud function in GCP. Some of the initial work done on the raspberry Pi included using the requests library and the Webex teams SDK. These weren’t available in GCP (at the time of writing), so I had to use standard HTTP posts using http library. This was not difficult to do, but required some thought. In addition, the cloud scheduler needed some IAM privileges to access the function. After working through those two items, I had a development room where I validated functionality, and after a few days migrated it to production.
The updated repo for the daily positive is here, containing both the Raspberry Pi code, and the gcp software. https://github.com/will0129/thedailypositive
A nice aspect of this, is the function is extremely lightweight and, with it only running once a day, doesn’t even scratch the surface on pricing. So this makes this migration a very affordable way to ensure that the daily positive can bring a bit of good news … daily … regardless of the state of my Raspberry Pi.
