Proactively surfacing integration failures to reduce support load and increase trust.

Proactively surfacing integration failures to reduce support load and increase trust.

Proactively surfacing integration failures to reduce support load and increase trust.

Team

Red Canary

Shipped

2025

Tags

UX loopholes

Design advocacy

Pain points

  • Customers didn't know why an integration would suddenly fail to send data.

  • Failing integrations pose a huge security posture risk, customers were blind to this.

My role

  • Advocated for a proactive solution to prevent catastrophic data failures.

  • Designed the notification UX with clear, actionable messaging.

Outcomes

  • Increased transparency, reduced support tickets.

  • Strengthened the trust in the platform's reliability.

  • Established a pattern for proactive alerting.

Pain points

  • Customers didn't know why an integration would suddenly fail to send data.

  • Failing integrations pose a huge security posture risk, customers were blind to this.

My role

  • Advocated for a proactive solution to prevent catastrophic data failures.

  • Designed the notification UX with clear, actionable messaging.

Outcomes

  • Increased transparency, reduced support tickets.

  • Strengthened the trust in the platform's reliability.

  • Established a pattern for proactive alerting.

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Summary

I implemented a proactive notification system to alert customers to integration failures in real-time. The solution decreased support escalations by ~25%, improved troubleshooting efficiency, and reinforced trust in Red Canary’s platform reliability.

The problem

Expired certificates and failing integrations caused friction, and customers were not notified when integrations became non-functional. This increased support requests and risked customer trust.

"To toast or not to toast?"

Do we use a simple toast component to inform customers of failing status checks or do we need to deliver more?

Customers need an area to see the true status of an integration without combing through hundreds of status checks.U1
A toast is fine. Its cheap to implement.U2
Why are the status checks failing in the first place? U3
Let's just redo status checks. U4

Key Decision

Key Decision

Expose individual status checks within an integration.

The solution

Implemented a real-time status notification system for expired certificates and integration failures. Included contextual help to guide customers through resolution.

What went right

  • It was easy to get buy-in on this, it was an obvious gap and low effort to fix.

  • Design review went smoothly.

Tough spots

  • Figuring out how we alert users to these types of integration failures without causing a panic.

How we solved it

100

Integrations improved

2 weeks

Total project time

3

Team size

Getting started

The good news on this project is we didn't need any new patterns, we had all the right things to solve this problem already and we just needed to put them together. We just finished adding a new section to our integration pages that gives users a changelog, I thought this was a great opportunity to leverage that area further and add a new section (tab component) to expose which status checks were failing for a given integration and call them out explicitly to grab the users attention when to do fail. 

Putting it all together

This, coupled with a new status badge on the integrations list page, would give users immediate and obvious indicators as to which integrations were failing and what they needed to do to resolve it. As a bonus, it gives extra exposure to the “status checks” area of the portal, which is an often overlooked but very important part of the platform as it is the only real “health” indicator of a customer’s Red Canary environment.

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Lessons learned

  • When you see a problem that's not being addressed, be vocal, be relentless, and make the solution happen.

  • Always give the user an action to take when something is broken