How to Import an Google Cloud Monitoring Notification Channel into Terraform

Import Google Cloud Monitoring Notification Channel with Terraback (recommended)

Terraback reverse-engineers your live infrastructure: it reads the Cloud Monitoring resource with read-only credentials, generates the HCL, and produces the exact import block. Two commands take you from a live Google Cloud Monitoring Notification Channel to managed Terraform.

terraback scan all gcp --project my-gcp-project

terraback gcp import --method bulk

The Terraform import block

Terraback emits a Terraform 1.5+ import block like the one below. Because the block lives in your configuration, the import is reviewable in a pull request and repeatable across environments.

import {
  to = google_monitoring_notification_channel.oncall
  id = "projects/my-project/notificationChannels/1234567890123456789"
}

Example google_monitoring_notification_channel configuration

Here is a realistic Google Cloud Monitoring Notification Channel block. Terraback generates a fuller version from your actual resource attributes; this is a minimal, valid starting point.

resource "google_monitoring_notification_channel" "oncall" {
  display_name = "On-call email"
  type         = "email"
  enabled      = true

  labels = {
    email_address = "oncall@example.com"
  }
}

Gotchas when importing a Google Cloud Monitoring Notification Channel

• The import ID uses the numeric notificationChannels/<id>, not the display_name.
• The required labels keys depend on type; an email channel uses email_address, while a Slack or PagerDuty channel uses different keys.
• Secret fields such as auth tokens (sensitive_labels) are not returned on import and must be re-supplied.
• Alert policies reference channels by this full resource name, so import channels before the policies that use them.

Doing it manually with terraform import

The native approach is to write the google_monitoring_notification_channel block by hand, then run terraform import google_monitoring_notification_channel.example <import-id> for every resource, one at a time. That works for a handful of resources, but it does not scale: you author all the HCL yourself and repeat the command for each item. Terraback generates the HCL and the import blocks for your whole account in one pass.

Import other Google Cloud resources