Email, Slack, Teams or PagerDuty: where should your stock alerts go?

OpenBoxes Lift can tell you about a stock problem in four places: an email, a Slack channel, a Microsoft Teams channel or a PagerDuty incident. They are not four copies of the same thing. The email carries everything the daily check finds; the other three carry stock-outs only, each in a different way. This article sets out what each one carries, how to choose, and how to combine them. Setting each one up is covered in the docs articles linked below.

What is the same everywhere#

• One check a day. Every destination is fed from the same daily check of your instance, taken in your instance's own timezone. None of them is real time: a product that runs out at noon is reported after the next daily check sees it.
• A minimum has to be set. A product with no minimum level at a location is never checked for being low or out of stock there, however low it gets.
• Opt-in and included. Nothing is sent until someone on your account turns a destination on, under Integrations, Destinations in the portal. There is no add-on to buy, on Shared or Dedicated instances.
• A shared team setting. Anyone on your account can change the stock alert email's settings, and can add, change, test or remove a Slack, Teams or PagerDuty destination. Only the account owner can add an email address outside your account.

What each one carries#

Email: the whole picture#

The daily stock alert email has two sections:

• Below minimum: products under the minimum you set, grouped by location, largest shortfall first. Products completely out of stock are part of this list.
• Expiring within your window: lots whose expiry date falls within 30, 60, 90, 180 or 365 days, whichever you choose.

It goes to the account owner and the teammates you tick, and can also go to up to five confirmed addresses outside your account, such as a supplier. It is sent shortly after 7am, at most once a day, and not at all when nothing is wrong; the Stock alerts panel shows that the check ran.

Slack and Microsoft Teams: stock-outs, where the team already talks#

A Slack or Microsoft Teams destination posts one message per product and location when a product with a minimum set reaches zero there, and one "Stock returned" message when the next daily check sees stock again. A product still at zero the next day is not posted again.

A channel does not page anyone. It suits a team that already works in Slack or Teams and wants stock-outs to be visible to everyone, where anyone can pick one up.

What you need: for Slack, an incoming webhook from a Slack app in your workspace; for Teams, a webhook from a Workflows workflow in the channel. The old Office 365 connector webhooks are refused, because Microsoft retired them.

PagerDuty: stock-outs that must reach someone on call#

A PagerDuty destination opens an incident when a product with a minimum set reaches zero at a location, and resolves it when the next daily check sees stock again. Incidents are sent at severity warning; whether that pages someone at once is decided by your PagerDuty service's urgency settings, not by us.

It suits an operation where a stock-out needs a named person to act, with the escalation that PagerDuty already gives you. Note that a test incident pages whoever is on call, unless you put the service in a maintenance window or point the destination at a test service first.

What you need: a PagerDuty service with an Events API v2 integration, and its integration key.

What never goes to a channel or PagerDuty#

Products that are below minimum but not at zero, and lots nearing expiry, are never sent to Slack, Teams or PagerDuty as alerts. They are in the email only. If below-minimum and expiring stock matter to you, keep the email on, whatever else you add.

How to choose#

Ask two questions for each kind of problem: who acts on it, and how soon.

• The person who orders needs the full list. Below-minimum and expiring stock are planning work: ordering, redistributing, chasing. That is the email, to the people who do it.
• A stock-out the whole team should see goes to a Slack or Teams channel.
• A stock-out that needs someone on call goes to PagerDuty, if you already run an on-call rotation there.

A common pattern is the email for the store manager and the account owner, plus one channel for the wider team. You can have up to five destinations of each kind, and every stock-out goes to all of them, so a PagerDuty service and a Teams channel can sit side by side.

Limits worth knowing#

• Busy days are capped with the true total. A Slack, Teams or PagerDuty destination gets at most 50 new stock-outs a day, then one more message or incident saying how many more there are. The email shows at most 50 rows per location in each section and 200 in all, and always states the real total when it cuts a list short.
• A destination that keeps failing switches itself off. If Slack, Teams or PagerDuty refuses our messages three times in a row, for example because the webhook or the service was deleted, the destination is switched off and the panel says so. Saving its URL or key again switches it back on.
• Webhook URLs and keys are stored encrypted and never shown again. You do not need your copy again: the saved one keeps working. To replace it, create a new one and paste it in under Edit (for PagerDuty, this closes the destination's open incidents first).

The weekly summary#

Separately from the daily alert, there is an opt-in weekly summary: a Monday email about the week before. A Slack or Teams destination can also get a short weekly post with the week's counts, if Also post the weekly summary here is ticked on it. It never carries stock values, and PagerDuty never receives it. See the weekly summary.

Summary#

• The email carries below-minimum and expiring stock; Slack, Teams and PagerDuty carry stock-outs only.
• Everything comes from one daily check, and only products with a minimum set are checked for being low.
• Choose by who acts and how soon: the email for planning, a channel for the team, PagerDuty for on call.
• Combine them freely; keep the email on if below-minimum or expiring stock matters.

Integrations lists every destination, and The daily stock-alert email covers getting the email right.

Setting up a channel: Stock-out alerts in Slack and Stock-out alerts in Microsoft Teams.