
Ask HN: HN Devs, to ChatOps or not to ChatOps? - rashcroft
Hey HN Devs,<p>Our team(of 20-25) is considering exploring ChatOps for a few use cases around incident management and server monitoring. In your experience, what are the pros and cons of doing ChatOps? What tools did you use(Hubot, Lita, Err, YellowAnt, Posh etc.)? What were the problems you were trying to solve and did ChatOps help?
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pyzon
We use ChatOps extensively for a team of 15-20 and it's been fantastic. It
makes life easier for devs and devops, and empowers QA and customer support to
perform various tasks that they would otherwise need dev or devops assistance
with.

We use it for deployment, building, getting status information from various
environments, a few escalated customer support tasks, as well as security and
monitoring alerts. Security and monitoring alerts above a certain severity
level also get delivered other ways.

We're running an old version of Hubot that talks to Slack. It crashes
frequently so we have a script that restarts it. It's ugly, but it works. I'm
planning an overhaul.

I can't really think of any cons, other than people constantly asking for more
plugins/scripts.

One thing that bears mentioning is that our team is Slack-heavy so this is a
natural cultural fit for us.

~~~
rashcroft
Gotcha! How many developer hours went into building your bot on Hubot? Was
there any development friction considering every script dev needs to
know/learn coffeescript?

