OK, so who's actually using External Actions to push GS data to OTHER platforms?

We use External Actions to push various messages to Slack, for example new NPS responses and other important customer events. It did take some testing to get the message Payload in the correct Slack format (there are a lot of options to beautify and add interactivity).

Although I know you were looking for use-cases outside of calling the Gainsight’s own API, but that is the primary use case. With External Actions Calling the Gainsight API we create functionality that doesn’t currently exist. For example a custom “real-time rules”.

Thanks for that, @benwanlessmenlo -- and I had some of the same challenges getting the message Payload into Slack format as well, but you are right - once you figure it out it’s easy to start tweaking to really make the messages you are posting to your Slack instance pop out!

Did you have to basically figure out the JSON Payload thru trial and error?

@sdrostgainsightcom  Yes, trial and error, and also finding mentions on specific elements on StackOverflow.

To add to the difficulty, Slack has different message formats and some features of the old format are being depreciated (i.e. simple buttons). It ends up that there are multiple ways to send the same message, not just one.

Hi @sdrostgainsightcom!

I actually just finished configuring and testing a connection to GSheets API. The idea came to be bc I found that there were a lot of processes being done were someone in my company had to download data and us it in their own team’s spreadsheet (Not ideal, I know). Either they exported it to S3 and took it from there, or downloaded the data from a report and pasted it in their own spreadsheet. And seeing as they didn’t want to change the way they worked, I thought I would simplify things a little bit. 

The way I did it needs to have a google project set up, but it is free for these transactions and it actually uses OAuth2.0 authentication + the spreadsheet’s sharing permissions so it will only allow you to do what it was defined in the project and not more (so the IT dpt should be fine with it)

The google project creation and configuration was done by mebecause mycompany actually allows it, but in other companies probably this will be done by the IT dpt.

I’m posting a discussion with the instructions in this group for a simple setup that allows to append records to a spreadsheets, but it has a lot of possibilities. 

The only gotcha was that I found that there is kind of a bug from gainsight’s side, support is already investigating. Sometimes Gainsight reports that the call was done successfully but the record doesn’t appear in the spreadsheet. I’ve tested it with postman and it works without any issues, so I hope it will be solved soon. 

Thank you for the detailed instructions post on the main channel for the group here, @Padolfi !  

Great stuff -- and let me know when you hear back from Support . . . curious if you are running this via a Rule and External Action, I’m guessing?  There isn’t a response from the target API?

The catch with the Rules Engine execution log (if that’s where you are seeing the “successful” calls in spite of data not actually landing in the target Google Sheet) is that it shows that the External Action successfully sent the calls out via the External Action, but it does not show whether the call itself failed or not.

For that, you should be able to see the result in the External Action execution log.  Is that also showing a successful response from the API itself?  Or is it not capturing the response at all?  

Let me know -- this use case has come up before so I’m interested in the resolution to make it a fully stable solution!