Subscriptions

Subscriptions allow you to subscribe to events that are happening within Octopus, so you can be notified when events have occurred and react accordingly. Both email and webhook notifications are currently supported.

Subscriptions can be accessed from the Configuration menu.

Email notifications

Email notifications can be setup to send an email periodically to the users of one or more teams. Emails will be sent periodically according to the frequency you specify, and the email will include a digest of events that have occurred (up to a maximum of 100 events). For example, this can be useful if your team has setup automated deployments with the Elastic and Transient Environment features of Octopus and wish to be notified if an auto-deployment is ever blocked or has failed.

Emails may also include a link to your Octopus Audit screen, filtered to match the events delivered in the email. To include this link, you need to have set the publicly-accessible URL of your Octopus instance (see the Configuration ➜ Nodes ➜ Configuration Settings menu or the Server Configuration documentation for more details).

Example

Getting Started - Subscriptions

Let’s say you have some critical projects and you want your administrators to receive an email if something is wrong with these deployments. You can setup an email subscription to notify your teams when these critical events have occurred.

Consider the following example:

We can select the Deployment-critical events group, which will automatically filter all deployment-critical events for us.

We can then select just the projects/environments we want to monitor. In this case: our Infrastructure or Code projects. Also, we only want to get notified when these critical events occur in our Production environment.

So in this example, all users in the Octopus Administrators team (with a valid email address) will receive an email notification for Deployment-critical events, in the Infrastructure or Code projects, that occurred in our Production environment.

You can read more about getting started with notifications in our Getting Started guide.

We can then hit Save and this subscription will show up in our subscriptions list screen.

Role permissions

Each email will be customized based on the user’s roles, so they will only be emailed with events that they have permission to see. See the “Event Visibility and Permissions” section below for more details.

Webhook notifications

Webhook notifications allow you to receive a JSON payload, posted to a specified URL when events have occurred. Webhook notifications will be sent per event (unlike email notifications that send a digest of events) and will include a payload with the following structure:

{
  "Timestamp": "0001-01-01T00:00:00+00:00",
  "EventType": "SubscriptionPayload",
  "Payload": {
    "ServerUri": "http://my-octopus.com",
    "ServerAuditUri": "http://my-octopus.com",
    "Subscription": {},
    "Event": {},
    "BatchProcessingDate": "0001-01-01T00:00:00+00:00",
    "BatchId": "[guid]",
    "TotalEventsInBatch": "3",
    "EventNumberInBatch": "10"
  }
}

The Payload includes:

* This property will be null unless the publicly-accessible URL has been set for your Octopus instance (see the Configuration ➜ Nodes ➜ Configuration Settings menu).

** This property is available since version 3.12.5

Event visibility and permissions

Because certain teams may be restricted to only see certain events, subscriptions give you the ability to scope to one or more teams. Teams may be restricted to certain criteria, such as project(s) and/or environment(s). Combine these restrictions with team roles and you can successfully control which events get seen for a given subscription. See more information on Managing Users and Teams as well as our User Roles documentation if you wish to learn more.

Troubleshooting

Logs for subscriptions can be found in the Configuration menu under Diagnostics (see the Subscription logs tab). You can then click the Verbose flag to view all related information to help with troubleshooting.

Email notification troubleshooting

If you are setting up email subscriptions for the first time and would like a good test SMTP server (before you involve your real SMTP servers), we have found mailtrap.io to be extremely helpful. This can help you to see what the actual emails will look like once you involve your real SMTP servers.

Webhook notification troubleshooting

If you are setting up webhook subscriptions for the first time and would like a simple test server where you can see the payloads that Octopus will actually send, we have found RequestBin to be extremely helpful.

For example, to test whether the subscription webhooks are sending correctly from Octopus, you could setup a temporary RequestBin, and use that URL in your subscription to confirm whether the payload is sending successfully from Octopus. This will also show you a real-time payload of what your API can expect to receive from an Octopus webhook subscription.

Subscription events

The following is a list of all options for subscriptions including Event Groups, Events, and Document Types:

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Page updated on Monday, April 10, 2023