Configure Grafana notifications for Teams Workflows with message previews

Question

Configure Grafana notifications for Teams Workflows with message previews

Shammi-STL 0

My Grafana Version is 12.4.1. we are in the process of moving to Team Workflow webhooks as the Office 365 connector webhooks are being deprecated.

We have made use of the following Workflow Template

User's image

When configured with its webhook link, the above template works for us with its default configuration to send out alerts to our dedicated teams channels we made for Grafana alerts. The problem we have is, these notifications dont provide at a glance information on banner messages or in teams activity page as there doesnt seem to be any preview

User's image

These alerts used to display the grafana notification summary configured on the alert when using with the Office 365 connector webhooks. Is there a possibility to have that summary when using Workflows?

Your support is greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

0 comments

2 answers

Your answer

Answer 1

Teams Workflows that use the When a Teams webhook request is received trigger post their messages through the Workflows (Power Automate) infrastructure. In this model, the activity feed and toast notifications show a generic "Workflows posted a new message" entry and don't surface a custom preview text from the incoming payload.

The available documentation for Workflows and Teams webhooks describes:

Using workflow templates such as Send webhook alerts to a channel or building a flow from scratch with the When a Teams webhook request is received trigger to post messages to chats or channels.
Support for Adaptive Cards and Message Card formats, with some limitations (for example, button rendering), but it does not expose any configuration to control the short preview text shown in the Teams activity feed or toast notifications.
Known issues and limitations focus on posting identity (flow bot vs. user) and channel types, not on notification previews.

There is therefore no documented way in Workflows to restore the old Office 365 connector behavior where the Grafana alert summary appeared as the preview text in Teams notifications. The preview text is controlled by Teams for Workflows messages and is not configurable via the webhook payload or the workflow definition.

To get richer, more controllable notifications, the documented alternatives are:

Build a notification bot (for example, using the Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit) and send proactive messages, or
Use other notification mechanisms such as the Teams notification APIs or activity feed notifications, which provide more control over how notifications appear.

However, these approaches require building a custom Teams app or bot; they do not change the behavior of the existing Teams Workflows webhook templates.

References:

Answer 2

Dear @Shammi-STL,

I hope you’re having a good day.

Thank you for sharing the detailed information and screenshots, they are very helpful. I’ve reviewed your scenario and also compared it with similar cases and current platform behavior.

From what I can see, the configuration you’ve implemented is working correctly, and the behavior you’re observing is related to how Teams Workflows (Power Automate webhooks) currently handle notifications, rather than an issue with Grafana or the webhook setup.

Previously, when using Office 365 connector webhooks, notifications were based on the MessageCard format, which includes a summary field. Teams uses that field to generate notification previews (for example, in banner pop-ups and the Activity feed). This is why your Grafana alerts were able to display a short summary “at a glance”.

After migrating to Workflows webhooks, the message format changes: Workflows typically post content using Adaptive Cards

Based on observed behavior and available documentation, Teams does not consistently surface Adaptive Card content in notification previews (especially for messages posted via Workflows)

As a result, users may see generic notifications such as:

“Workflows posted a new message”
“Message has no preview”

This behavior has also been noted in similar scenarios, where preview and summary areas for workflow-based messages do not display the card content and may be truncated or omitted by design to keep the activity feed concise

In addition, Microsoft has announced the deprecation of Office 365 Connectors and recommends transitioning to Workflows as the supported replacement moving forward. However, based on current behavior, the Workflows approach does not fully replicate the notification preview experience that connectors previously provided.

Regarding your question: Is there a possibility to have the summary when using Workflows?

At the moment, there isn’t a native or fully reliable way to restore the same preview behavior as Office 365 connectors.

There are a few approaches you could test, although results may vary:

Including a summary field in the payload can sometimes influence how notifications are displayed, but this is not consistently honored in Workflows-based posts

Structuring the Adaptive Card with a short title or summary at the top can improve readability inside the channel, but it doesn’t affect banner or Activity previews

If having a visible alert summary in notifications is critical for your monitoring flow, you may also consider alternative approaches such as:

Using a Teams bot for notifications
Or integrating through other mechanisms that provide more control over notification content

I understand this is a noticeable difference compared to the previous connector experience, especially for alerting scenarios like Grafana. Hopefully this area will improve as the Workflows model continues to evolve.

Warm regards,

If the answer is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and kindly upvote it. If you have extra questions about this answer, please click "Comment".

Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.

Austin Jordan 0 Reputation points

2026-08-13T14:44:50.8433333+00:00

@Liora D this is extremely frustrating move by Microsoft. Our team uses Teams religiously and integrated webhooks into our flows for alerts.

Now, we have started the process of migrating them to the workflows, but the workflows when you send an adaptive card no longer support the 'summary' node in the json that would put preview text in the activity sidebar of teams.

So now, instead of just being able to migrate to a workflow URL that uses adaptive cards, we are left with the choice of moving away from adaptive cards and using "@type": "MessageCard" (because for some magic reason the summary preview text still works on those), but MessageCard's do not offer the same features as Adaptive Cards. This honestly just seems like an incredibly lazy decision by the engineers at Microsoft.

Suppose you get alerts throughout your workday on Teams and they all just read 'Card' instead of having some sort of summary/preview capability. This is an annoyance to every single team member b/c you have to click in the card to see what the content is or determine if it's relevant to you.

Is Microsoft working on restoring this feature for Workflows to support showing a preview for webhooks when using Adaptive Cards? The only way around it I found was to build a custom workflow that takes custom json (not an adaptive card) and parse the content and send an alert via that mechanism. Again, this is tedious and seems like Microsoft just decided it was too big an engineering challenge to support previews for Adaptive Cards sent via Workflows? This seems like a massive oversight.