Building a BIME notification Slack bot

This detailed guide will explain how to use BIME, Zapier, and Slack to deliver BIME notifications to your Slack channels.

Required:

• 1 dashboard viewer seat
• Zapier account
• Slack account
• Dashboard that you’d like to share

Creating a BIME notification Slack bot

Follow the instructions below to receive BIME notifications in Slack. Please ensure you meet the requirements above before beginning. 

Step 1. Sign up for Zapier

If you aren’t using Zapier already, it’s an amazing tool for creating automations and workflows between the services your company uses. You can sign up at: www.zapier.com.

Step 2. Create a new Zap

From your Zapier dashboard, click Make a Zap! along the top menu and start by adding Zapier’s New Inbound Email integration. You’ll be prompted to create an email address. Make this address unique and do not share it with others. Copy this email to your clipboard.

Step 3. Create a new user group and user in BIME

In BIME, navigate to your Admin section () and create a new dashboard viewer group. Name this group “Email Notifications”. Next, create a new viewer and add the email you copied from the previous step.

Step 4. Test your Zapier email integration

From your primary email, send an email to your Zapier email address to test that the email can be delivered properly. The reason you are testing the integration outside of BIME is that there is a delay when you schedule your first email delivery in BIME. Rather than sit around and wait, it’s easier to fire off an email from your primary email account. 

Step 5. Create Slack/Zapier Integration

In Zapier, click the plus sign (+) and add a new integration to your workflow. This time, select Slack as your integration and then select Send Channel Message. Authenticate with your Slack account and move on to the next step. You may need to work with your Slack administrator to ensure that you have the ability to enable Zapier as a Slack integration. 

Step 6. Edit Slack Template

This is the fun part! From Zapier, edit the template of your message that will be sent to Slack. You can name your bot, configure the message that’ll be sent to Slack, etc.

Note: If you’d like to have your dashboard posted as an image in your channel make sure to include your attachment in the Attach Image by URL box and set the Auto-Expand Links option to yes.

Step 7. Schedule your delivery

From BIME, add your newly created group to a dashboard that you’d like to push to Slack. If you’d like to have this dashboard sent via an alert, you can configure this in the Admin section of your account. If you would like to have your dashboard attached as an image along with your message in Slack, make sure you check the Image box when scheduling your delivery.

All done! After you’ve schedule your delivery, republish your dashboard and you’ll soon start to see your BIME alerts pushed to Slack.

Want to improve this tip? We’d love to hear if you have any ideas that would improve this workflow.  

Bonus Tip

Want to run BI on BI? We suggest adding a third, Google Sheet integration, step in this workflow. Every time this integration triggers, a new record will be written to a Google Sheet. After you’ve set up this integration, you can connect your Google Sheet to BIME and start analyzing how often your alerts are triggered and what is triggering them.