Twilio support - multiple outbound numbers

[jdrummey]

This suggestion is to move the Twilio smsaction.account_id and smsaction.auth_token options from the vizalerts.yaml to the VizAlerts schedule viz where they could be parameters/calculated fields. The reason why is that Twilio enables pretty fine-grained controls over the phone numbers and each outbound phone number can have a different auth_token.

Jonathan

[mcoles]

For mapping certain alerts to certain other outgoing numbers, my thought was that the Twilio admin could define specific Message Services, which map to the outgoing numbers you wished to be used. In VizAlerts, you could then specify the "from number" as the Messaging Service SID defined in Twilio, which would complete the mapping.

I intentionally kept the auth token out of the viz, as I'm a bit concerned about out-of-the-box security. That value would be kept in plaintext in Tableau Server, embedded in the viz, dumped to the temp folder, potentially emailed in the event of a failure, etc. Plus it'd remove the ability to specify a filepath rather than the actual token, which is another security-focused feature (allows for fewer accidents storing the yaml file in source control, or sending to support--e.g., us!).

[mcoles]

If we can't accommodate custom mappings people are going to need, using just Message Services, then I'm open to ideas.

[jdrummey]

You're right, there are multiple ways to accomplish this, I'd forgotten about Twilio's messaging services. I propose we leave this open for now and see what other users might desire.