System Integration: Connecting to APIs and Services

In our last lesson, we built a resilient foundation for our Triage Agent. It now has a global error handler, and we have a clear process for debugging, making it a reliable tool that Alex and his team can trust.

However, the agent’s primary function is still just communication. It tells the team about bugs, but doesn’t do anything with them. The final pieces of manual toil in Alex’s “triage tax” remain: a developer sees the Slack alert, then manually creates a task in their project management board and updates the team’s daily engineering log. To be a true assistant, our agent needs to take these last steps itself.

This lesson is about integrating our agent into the team’s core systems. You will learn how to use n8n’s dedicated app nodes to connect to services like Monday.com and Google Docs, and how to use the universal HTTP Request node to connect to any REST API.

Integrating your full tech stack

A powerful automation platform must be able to connect to every part of your existing tech stack. n8n provides two primary methods for this, each suited to a different need.

• The high-level abstraction: Dedicated app nodes, like the ones for Monday.com or Google Docs, are pre-built clients for popular services. Think of these nodes as importing a well-maintained, official SDK or library. The node abstracts away the boilerplate of authentication, endpoint discovery, and data formatting. You simply select a resource (like Item or Document) and an operation (like Create or Append To) from a drop-down menu.

• The low-level universal connector: The HTTP request node is your tool for connecting to any service that exposes a REST API, even if n8n doesn’t have a dedicated node for it. This node is the equivalent of using curl, Postman, or a generic HTTP client library like axios or requests. It gives you complete, low-level control over the method, URL, headers, and body of the request. ...