API Monitoring Guide
Get alerted when Slack has issues before your team notices broken workflows. Learn which endpoints to monitor and how to set up proactive alerting.
Slack is the backbone of team communication for millions of organizations. When it goes down, alerts stop flowing, bots stop working, and workflows grind to a halt. This guide covers why you need external monitoring, which endpoints to track, and how to respond when Slack has issues.
Slack maintains their own status page at status.slack.com. So why set up external monitoring?
External monitoring catches issues in 1-2 minutes, not 10-15. That gives you time to switch to backup channels before your team is impacted.
Focus on the endpoints that matter most to your team's workflows:
POST https://slack.com/api/api.test
Simple health check. Returns {"ok": true} when Slack is up. No authentication required.
POST https://slack.com/api/auth.test
Tests authentication. Requires a valid bot token. Confirms your integrations can connect.
POST https://hooks.slack.com/services/T.../B.../...
Your incoming webhook URL. Monitor to ensure you can post messages to channels.
POST https://slack.com/api/chat.postMessage
Message sending endpoint. Requires bot token. Verifies you can post to channels.
POST https://slack.com/api/conversations.list
Channel listing endpoint. Monitor if your app needs to discover or manage channels.
Tip: The api.test endpoint requires no authentication at all, making it the easiest way to monitor Slack's general availability. Use it as your primary health check.
Create a monitor for https://slack.com/api/api.test using POST method. This checks Slack's general availability without needing any credentials.
For deeper monitoring, add a check to auth.test with your bot token:
Since Slack itself might be down, make sure alerts go somewhere else too:
If you use incoming webhooks for alerts or notifications, add those as separate monitors to verify they're accepting messages.
Configure your monitors to alert on these conditions:
Check for "ok":true in the response body. Slack returns HTTP 200 even for some errors, so body validation catches issues that status code checks miss.
When your monitoring alerts you to a Slack issue, here's how to respond:
Check status.slack.com and @SlackStatus on Twitter. Your monitoring may catch issues before they're publicly acknowledged.
Notify your team via email, SMS, or your backup communication tool. If your monitoring alerts route through Slack, verify those alerts are now going via email instead.
If your applications send messages to Slack, implement retry logic. Queue messages and replay them once Slack recovers, rather than losing them.
Audit which workflows depend on Slack: deployment notifications, customer support routing, on-call escalations. Manually handle critical workflows until Slack recovers.
slack.com/api/api.test -- it requires no authentication and confirms Slack's general availability. For deeper checks, add auth.test with your bot token, and monitor your incoming webhook URLs if you use them for alerts.
Add Slack to your monitors and get alerted on issues instantly. Free tier includes 25 monitors.
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