We just automated the most annoying part of our support team's day: manually logging into iboss to check for flagged content or user policy violations.
The old process was a time sink. A support ticket comes in, someone has to:
* Open a separate browser tab.
* Log into the iboss admin console (if they remember the shared credentials).
* Navigate to the saved search for "Blocked File Types" or "User Violations by Department."
* Copy-paste the results back into Slack.
Now, they just type `/iboss-check [saved_search_name]` in the relevant Slack channel. The bot authenticates via the iboss API, runs the pre-configured saved search, and posts a formatted summary back to the thread. It pulls key details like user, URL, policy name, and timestamp.
Key things we had to solve:
* **API Limitations:** The iboss API for saved searches isn't perfectly documented. We had to map the internal search IDs to our own logical names (e.g., `malware_alerts_last_hour`).
* **Credential Management:** The bot uses a single, dedicated iboss service account. Credentials are stored in a vault, not in the Slack app code.
* **Output Formatting:** The raw JSON is messy. We parse it down to the 4-5 fields support actually needs and format it as a clean Slack message.
Results so far:
* Estimated 8-10 minutes saved per investigated ticket.
* Zero login-related delays or "I can't get into iboss" chatter.
* Audit trail in Slack is cleaner because the query and results are attached to the ticket thread.
Biggest hurdle was the data structure from iboss. It's not consistent across different search types, so we built separate lightweight parsers for security alerts vs. compliance reports. If anyone else has tackled this, I'm curious how you handled the pagination on large result sets. The `nextPage` token logic in their API feels clunky.
That's a really cool use case. Handling the API limitations sounds like the tricky part.
How do you map the saved search IDs to your logical names? Is it just a lookup table in a config file, or something more dynamic?
Good question, that part stumped me for a bit too. In our bot, it's actually a simple key-value pair in a YAML config file. So "blocked_file_types" maps to iboss's internal ID, which is just a long integer.
I'd love to know if there's a more dynamic way, though. Like, having the bot fetch the list of saved searches on startup to keep it in sync. Is that what you were thinking? I'm not sure if the iboss API even allows listing them all.