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The Kestrel Slack integration brings incident response, workflow automation, and AI copilot capabilities directly into your team’s chat. Receive real-time notifications, trigger workflows from Slack, and use slash commands to interact with your infrastructure.

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Prerequisites

  • Organization Admin role in Kestrel
  • Slack workspace admin permissions (to authorize the app)

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Setup

1

Connect your workspace

  1. Navigate to Integrations → Slack in your Kestrel dashboard
  2. Click Connect Slack Workspace
  3. Authorize the Kestrel app in the Slack OAuth popup
  4. The popup closes and your workspace appears as connected
2

Invite the bot

Invite the Kestrel bot to channels where you want notifications:
3

Sync users

Click Sync Now on the User Mapping card to sync Slack users with Kestrel accounts. This enables smart @mentions for namespace owners.
Create a dedicated #incidents channel for Kestrel notifications to keep them organized.

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How It’s Used

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In Workflows

Trigger blocks:
  • Create K8s Resource — fires when a user requests Kubernetes resource creation via /kestrel-workflow
  • Edit K8s Resource — fires when a user requests a Kubernetes resource edit via /kestrel-workflow
  • General Kubernetes Request — fires on any Kubernetes-related /kestrel-workflow request
  • Create AWS Resource — fires when a user requests AWS resource creation via /kestrel-workflow
  • Edit AWS Resource — fires when a user requests an AWS resource edit via /kestrel-workflow
  • General Cloud Request — fires on any cloud-related /kestrel-workflow request
  • Any Slack /kestrel-workflow Request — fires on any /kestrel-workflow command invocation
Action blocks:
  • Send Message — post a message to a Slack channel or DM
  • Update Message — update an existing Slack message in place
  • Request Justification — send an interactive approval/justification prompt and wait for a response
Example: A workflow triggers on a Create K8s Resource request from Slack, sends a justification prompt to the requester’s manager, and upon approval creates the resource and posts a confirmation.
The /kestrel-workflow command lets any team member trigger pre-built workflows without leaving Slack — for example, /kestrel-workflow restart-pod namespace=payments pod=api-server.

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In Incident Response

  • Real-time notifications — posts to your configured channel with incident summary, severity, affected resources, root cause analysis, and remediation steps
  • Smart @mentions — namespace owners are automatically @mentioned when incidents affect their namespaces
  • Interactive Q&A — reply in the incident notification thread to ask follow-up questions with full incident context
  • Knowledge source — Slack message history is searchable during incident RCA (see Knowledge Sources)

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In Cloud AI Copilot

Use the /kestrel slash command anywhere in Slack to ask questions about your infrastructure:
  • /kestrel what pods are crashing in production?
  • /kestrel show me the network policies for the payments namespace
  • /kestrel what Terraform code manages my S3 buckets?

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Disconnecting

  1. Navigate to Integrations → Slack
  2. Click Disconnect Slack
  3. Confirm the disconnection
This immediately stops all notifications and removes the bot from your workspace. You can reconnect at any time.