ArgoCD Slack Notifications

Get notified in Slack when your application fails to sync or becomes unhealthy — and, if you opt in, when it’s deployed. Everything is configured from your own application.yaml in Git — you don’t need to raise a ticket with the IDP team.

Quick start

Add a slackChannel to your application.yaml, pointing at a public Slack channel:

apiVersion: v2
name: my-application
description: My application
version: 0.1.0
slackChannel: my-team-alerts
helm:
  chart: helm/idp-advanced
  chartVersion: "3.5.1" # check latest at github.com/jppol-idp/helm-idp/releases

Commit and let ArgoCD sync. By default you’ll get a Slack message only when something goes wrong — see Default notifications below.

The channel must already exist and be public. For private channels, see Public vs. private channels.

Default notifications

With just slackChannel set, you receive notifications for failures only:

You get notified when…	Trigger
A sync operation fails	on-sync-failed
The application becomes unhealthy (Degraded)	on-health-degraded
The sync status becomes Unknown	on-sync-status-unknown

You will not be notified about every successful sync — that quickly becomes noise. If you want to know about deployments too, opt in with slackTriggers below.

Choosing which notifications you get

Set slackTriggers to a list of triggers to override the default. When slackTriggers is present, you receive exactly those triggers — nothing else.

slackChannel: my-team-alerts
slackTriggers:
  - on-sync-failed
  - on-deployed

Available triggers

Trigger	Fires when	Noise
on-sync-failed	A sync operation fails	Low
on-health-degraded	The app’s health becomes Degraded	Low
on-sync-status-unknown	The sync status becomes Unknown	Low
on-deployed	The app is synced and healthy — once per commit	Low — one message per release
on-sync-succeeded	Every successful sync operation	High — also fires on self-heal/refresh syncs
on-sync-running	A sync starts	High
on-created	The application is created	One-off
on-deleted	The application is deleted	One-off

Want to know when something is deployed? Use on-deployed, not on-sync-succeeded. on-deployed sends one message per actual release (per commit, only when healthy), whereas on-sync-succeeded fires on every sync — including automated self-heal syncs that didn’t change anything.

Examples

Failures only (this is also the default, so slackTriggers is optional here):

slackChannel: my-team-alerts
slackTriggers:
  - on-sync-failed
  - on-health-degraded
  - on-sync-status-unknown

Failures plus a message on every deployment:

slackChannel: my-team-alerts
slackTriggers:
  - on-sync-failed
  - on-health-degraded
  - on-sync-status-unknown
  - on-deployed

Deployments only (no failure alerts):

slackChannel: my-team-deploys
slackTriggers:
  - on-deployed

Public vs. private channels

• Public channels work out of the box. Just set slackChannel — nothing else to do.

• Private channels need one extra step — the bot must be a member before it can post there. Add it to the channel once, using either method:

  • Quickest: in the channel, type /invite @IDP ArgoCD Notifications and pick the app with the octopus icon.
  • Via the menu: open the channel name → Integrations → Add apps, search for IDP ArgoCD Notifications (the octopus icon — not the similarly named plain ArgoCD app), and click Add.

  Either way, notifications are then delivered the same as for public channels.

Notes

• slackChannel takes the channel name without the leading # (e.g. my-team-alerts, not #my-team-alerts).
• slack_channel (snake_case) is accepted as an alias for slackChannel for backwards compatibility. Prefer slackChannel for new applications.
• Changes take effect on the next ArgoCD sync of your application.

Need help?

If notifications don’t arrive as expected, contact the IDP team on Slack.