Send notifications through an SMS gateway using URL Targets
As an example, here’s how to use URL Targets to send SMS messages through the most widely used SMS gateway provider (http://www.clickatell.com).
1. Set up an account at clickatell.com. It’s a paid service but they provide a free trial.
Follow the steps in Clickatell HTTP API Guide to setup the account, add a HTTP connection and obtain an API ID.
2. Create an URL target in Zendesk
Go to Account → Targets → ‘Add Target’ and select ‘URL Target’ as target type.
You need to provide the destination URL, the method of the request (‘GET’ in this case), and the name of the attribute that will carry the notification message of the event generated in Zendesk.
The example URL shown in clickatell’s page is:
http://api.clickatell.com/http/sendmsg?user=xxxxx&password=xxxxx&api_id=xxxxx&to=xxxxxxxxx&text=Meet+me+outside
This means that the attribute that will carry the message is ‘text’ and the destination URL is the rest of the example’s URL without the ‘text’ attribute:
http://api.clickatell.com/http/sendmsg?user=xxxxx&password=xxxxx&api_id=xxxxx&to=xxxxxxxxx
Where:
- user: is your clickatell username
- password: is your clickatell password
- api_id: is the clickatell http connection API ID
- to: is the mobile number to send the sms message
Zendesk will attach the ‘text’ attribute to the destination url with the according message.
Test the target to see if you receive a test message from Clickatell (you can send only 10 messages in your free trial).
To see real messages you need to purchase one of the clickatell’s services.
After creating the target you can associate it to a trigger to send specific notifications. See a detailed description to do this.