Azure DevOps Bug Priority Change to Slack Alert

Overview

This flow monitors an Azure DevOps project for work item updates and sends an instant Slack alert when a Bug's priority is escalated to Critical or High. It bridges the gap between Azure DevOps issue tracking and Slack team communication, ensuring high-priority bugs get immediate visibility without requiring team members to constantly monitor their ADO boards.

> Flow State: Stopped (demo) — Turn on after configuring environment variables and connections for your tenant.

Use Case

Scenario: A development team manages bugs in Azure DevOps but communicates day-to-day in Slack. When a QA engineer or product owner escalates a bug to Critical or High priority, the relevant Slack channel should be notified immediately so developers can triage without delay.

The flow is ideal for teams that:

• Developers — instant awareness of critical bugs without leaving Slack
• QA Engineers — confidence that escalated bugs get immediate attention
• Team Leads — visibility into priority changes across the project

Flow Architecture

Environment Variables

Connectors & Connections

Note — All connections are referenced as solution connection references; the flow is portable between environments as long as a connection is mapped at import time.

Customization Guide

Almost every realistic variant of this flow can be implemented by changing environment variable values. A few cases require small edits inside the flow definition — those are called out explicitly below.

Changing which priorities trigger alerts

Update the flowlibs_BugPriorityAlertThresholds environment variable. The condition uses contains() to check if the bug's numeric priority appears in the threshold string. Examples: Alert on Critical only: 1 - Critical. Alert on Critical, High, and Medium: 1 - Critical,2 - High,3 - Medium.

Changing the Slack channel

Update the flowlibs_SlackChannelName environment variable to any channel your Slack connection has access to (e.g., #dev-alerts, #bug-triage).

Monitoring a different ADO project

Update flowlibs_AzureDevOpsOrgUrl with your organization account name and flowlibs_AzureDevOpsProjectName with the target project.

Adjusting polling frequency

Edit the trigger's recurrence settings. Default is every 5 minutes. Lower intervals give faster alerts but consume more API calls.

Customizing the alert message

Edit the Compose Slack Alert Message action. The message uses Slack markdown formatting (*bold*, \n for newlines). Available fields from the trigger body include all standard Azure DevOps work item fields.

Key Expressions

The flow is intentionally light on Power Fx / WDL gymnastics — the heaviest expressions are the branch-name concatenation and the approval outcome check. They are listed below in the order they appear in the flow.

triggerBody()?['fields']?['System.WorkItemType']

string(triggerBody()?['fields']?['Microsoft.VSTS.Common.Priority'])

contains(variables('varPriorityThresholds'), string(triggerBody()?['fields']?['Microsoft.VSTS.Common.Priority']))

coalesce(triggerBody()?['fields']?['System.AssignedTo']?['displayName'], 'Unassigned')

triggerBody()?['url']