TL;DR: Guru’s scheduled Analytics currently supports webhooks, but NOT Slack webhooks. This makes it much harder to send visuals of scheduled analytics to a Slack channel.

I was delighted to see that Guru’s Analytics feature offers an option to send scheduled report visuals to a webhook. This would be great to pipe scheduled reports into a Slack channel and increase the visibility of our knowledge stats across our organisation, I thought.

Alas, when I had created my Slack webhook (tested it, it did work) and set up my scheduled report in Guru Analytics, I received an error message rather than the report visuals in my Slack channel I was hoping for.

Speaking to Caroline via support chat, I learned that Slack webhooks expect a specific data format in JSON and that Guru’s scheduled Analytics does not match that format.

So it currently is not possible to send those reports to Slack via webhook. I have to admit this was quite the disappointment after having looked forward to the integration.

There might be ways to work around the issue, for example using a Zapier webhook instead. But those cost extra money and, more importantly, put a third-party in the middle of the process – with potential implications for an organisation’s compliance with data privacy regulation like GDPR. (At the very least, it may be another data processor on your DPA you have to keep track of.)

I would love to see Slack webhooks supported by scheduled Analytics, and I hope the idea of being able to send scheduled report visuals from Guru to a Slack channel seems intriguing enough for others to upvote this request.