Payload Checks

OpsLevel helps keep your services consistent and healthy through the use of various pre-built checks. However, not all checks fall perfectly in line with one of the pre-built checks provided by OpsLevel.

With payload checks, you can easily check the following types of conditions:

1. Using your vulnerability detection tool to ensure that no Tier-1 services have open vulnerabilities.
2. Using your vulnerability detection tool to ensure no Ruby services have high criticality vulnerabilities.
3. Ensuring your test coverage stays above a certain threshold.

You could implement examples like the above with Custom Checks, but Payload Checks make specifying thresholds significantly easier.

Getting Started with Payload Checks

Step 1: Create a Payload Check Integration

To set up a payload check endpoint, visit the Integrations tab and select “New Integration”, followed by Payload.

Click + Add Integration on the Payload Integration card and then New Payload Integration:

After creating a Payload Integration, you’ll be redirected to a page that looks like:

Step 2: Create a Payload Check

Payload checks are a type of check that allow you to send arbitrary JSON payloads to an OpsLevel endpoint and evaluate that payload against jq expressions.

To create a payload check, navigate to the Checklists tab.

If you already have checklists created, you will see them here. If not, visit the Checklists page to learn more about checks.

For the purpose of this guide, we will be using our All Services checklist.

Navigate to the checklist you wish to create a check for.

Press the + Add Check button.

From the Create Check modal, select Payload Check from the Type dropdown:

Fill out the check information and press Create. For examples of some useful jq expressions, refer to the Examples section.

Note: You can customize your Payload Check’s Pass and Fail messages by filling out the Pass Message and Fail Message fields.

After successfully creating a check, you will see it in the Checks card.

From here you can grab the Payload Check Identifier.

Sending a JSON Payload to OpsLevel

It is easy to start sending payloads for a payload check to a particular service in OpsLevel. Begin by navigating to the check result by visiting the Scorecards tab of your service. Hint: The check result will be yellow if you haven’t send a payload to that check for the specific service.

Using the Payload Check Identifier and any Service Alias provided, make an HTTP Post request like the example below, substituting your Webhook URL in place of xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx:

POST https://app.opslevel.com/integrations/payload/xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "service": "shopping_cart",
  "check": "checkIdentifier",
  "data": {
    "_comment": "YOUR DATA HERE"
  }
}

If your webhook was successful, you will receive the following response:

{
  "result": "ok"
}

Here is a full explanation of all the fields in the json object:

Handling Errors

The Payload check API may throw errors when receiving malformed requests, when utilizing endpoints that are no longer valid, or when we’re too busy trying to determine who the werewolf is among us to route your webhooks correctly.

In such cases, payload webhooks return verbose and descriptive errors.

An example of such error:

{
  "errors": [
    {
      "status": 422,
      "title": "No service found with alias 'invalid_alias'.",
      "detail": null
    }
  ]
}

The error above notifies the user that even though we received the webhook payload, the service provided was not found in your OpsLevel account.

Common Errors

Examples

Check for Vulnerabilities on Your Service’s Repositories with Snyk

When using Snyk, you may want to ensure that the repos used by your service have no high criticality security vulnerabilities. You can use Snyk’s API to fetch vulnerability counts.

Send a POST request to the following Snyk API Endpoint:

https://snyk.io/api/v1/reporting/counts/issues/latest?groupBy=severity

You will receive a response similar to:

{
  "results": [
    {
      "day": "2017-07-01",
      "count": 13,
      "severity": {
        "high": 0,
        "medium": 4,
        "low": 9
      }
    }
  ]
}

Forward this to OpsLevel’s payload check endpoint.

For a full example, do the following.

1. Get an API token and Organization ID from Snyk.

2. Set up the following environment variables:

   SNYK_TOKEN=<Snyk API Token>
   SNYK_ORGANIZATION=<Snyk Organization ID>
   OPSLEVEL_SERVICE_ALIAS=<OpsLevel Service Alias>
   OPSLEVEL_CHECK_ID=<OpsLevel Check ID>
   OPSLEVEL_PAYLOAD_URL_TOKEN=<OpsLevel Payload URL Token>
   

3. Run the following command:

   curl --X POST 'https://snyk.io/api/v1/reporting/counts/issues/latest?groupBy=severity' \
   --H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
   --H 'Authorization: '"$SNYK_TOKEN"'' \
   --data-raw '{
    "filters": {
        "orgs": ["'"$SNYK_ORGANIZATION"'"]
    }
   }' |\
   curl -X POST 'http://app.opslevel.com/integrations/payload/${OPSLEVEL_PAYLOAD_URL_TOKEN}' \
   -H 'content-type: application/json' \
   -d '{
     "service": "'$OPSLEVEL_SERVICE_ALIAS'",
     "check": "'$OPSLEVEL_CHECK_ID'",
     "data": '$(</dev/stdin)'
   }'
   

Check for Correct API Version on Kubernetes Deploy

In this example we will be using an example service called cartservice.

If you use Kubernetes and wish to check if you are using the correct API version on deploy, you can run the following command:

kubectl get deployment cartservice -o json

The resulting JSON payload can be forwarded to OpsLevel to run Payload Checks against. The payload will look similar to:

{
    "apiVersion": "apps/v1",
    "kind": "Deployment",
    # ...
    "status": {
        "availableReplicas": 1,
        # ...
    }
}