Quick start guide

In this Quick Start guide, we’ll show you how to obtain your free sample API key, what you can use your key for, how to send an alert and collect the results.

Step 1: Get a sample API key (if you don’t already have one)

If your account manager has already provided you with an API-key then you can skip this step and move on to step 2. Otherwise you can complete the API key request form below to automatically obtain a sample API key. The key will be emailed to the address you provide and will be valid for a short period; usually a week. You can use the same sample API key for both live and sandbox working. However, you can only have one sample API key at a time per email address.

For live working, the sample API key allows you to send a small number of real SMS/emails and make a small number of time-limited calls to a restricted list of recipients (specified in the form below). The sample API keys also restrict who you appear as when sending alerts, so certain elements such as the sender are ignored.

By using a sample API key you are agreeing to adhere to the Alerting Hub usage policy.

API key request form

Step 2: Check your API-key

Before sending your first alert it’s a good idea to just make sure you can communicate with the Alerting Hub API and that your API-key is setup and working. The easiest way to do this is to make a call to the /getinfo API endpoint which can return you a lot of information about your API-key and ensures that everything is configured ok.

Step 3: Send your first alert

Send a real, live, alert by calling our sendalert API using one of the following methods (see the API guide for more details):

• An HTTP POST with JSON to https://api.alert.alertinghub.co.uk/api/json/sendalert ^{(recommended)}
• An email with JSON attachment and a subject line of ‘sendalert’ to api@awsemail.alertinghub.co.uk

Sandbox testing is also available, when using the sandbox the amount of SMS, emails and calls that can be sent are much greater.

Examples of sending an alert (contained in ‘myalert.json’) via curl:

• Live: curl -v -H “Content-Type: application/json” –data @myalert.json https://api.alert.alertinghub.co.uk/api/json/sendalert
• Sandbox: curl -v -H “Content-Type: application/json” –data @myalert.json https://sandboxapi.alert.alertinghub.co.uk/api/json/sendalert

Step 4: Collect results

Once you’ve sent an alert, you may well wish to get updates on how it has progressed. You can get those updates by one of the following methods:

• Collection (pull) – If your sample API key was requested with ‘poll’ as the notification option you can make calls to our collectevents API. Please note that you can only call this API at a certain rate (usually 100 times an hour for the sample keys).
• Delivery (push) – If your sample API key was requested with ‘callback’ as the notification option or you specified a callback URL when sending the alert then Alerting Hub will send updates as and when they occur to that given URL.