
AWS Chatbot: ChatOps for AWS - gjmveloso
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/introducing-aws-chatbot-chatops-for-aws/
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t34543
I’m not a fan of ChatOps, call me old fashioned but I like tickets to track my
work.

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mooreds
Not affiliated, but this company built a slack to ticketing system bridge.

[https://halp.com](https://halp.com)

Maybe best of both worlds?

That said, at small companies where I have worked I have found slack/chatops
to be very useful. It's already there. You don't need a separate system.
Hopefully you have some other work organization tool (Trello, etc) that you
can use to track work (slack is great for real-time discussion and history but
I'd hate to have it be my to-do list).

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davnicwil
Ah this is extremely cool - having set up slackops by building bots on lambdas
in the past, I can attest it's way more difficult and time consuming than it
should be.

For an example of an unexpected issue you face - slackbots must give responses
within 3000ms otherwise slack reports the slash command as failed. This means
you have to do things like set up a proxy and worker lambda for anything that
doesn't execute essentially instantaneously, and even then it sometimes fails
to respond within 3000ms on cold starts.

A purpose built interface you can just get set up with a few clicks would be a
great improvement. Hope the other cloud providers introduce similar services
as well.

~~~
davnicwil
As an edit to the above, as pointed out in other comments, this actually only
does unidirectional notifications - i.e. pushing notifications to Slack. This
is the part that _is_ already really trivial, with Slack webhooks.

I suppose this hooks into stuff like SNS and may not require writing code or
running a server/lambda, but still, less useful than it first appeared. A
service for easily setting up backends for conversational slackbots or slash
commands would be much more exciting, in my opinion.

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sneak
ChatOps is bidirectional. This appears, at first glance, to simply be an
alerting channel that can deliver to Slack.

Useful, but only a small piece of a ChatOps picture.

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jdenning
Came here to say the same thing -- the real value in ChatOps comes when Ops
folks are issuing commands in the chat room; this enables other employees to
watch and learn how specific issues are investigated and resolved.

ChatOps is about providing visibility into operations.

~~~
somepig
> the real value in ChatOps comes when Ops folks are issuing commands in the
> chat room

yeah, being able to let Slack act as your identity management for manipulating
prod is a _killer_ app. much like sticking a pistol in your mouth

~~~
jdenning
We weren't actually using Slack. There are self-hosted alternatives.

You can also add a TOTP code to the command to get 2FA if you're really
worried about limiting the attack vector - I actually gave a conference talk
about that years ago.

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mediascreen
I've been waiting for something like this. But now that it's here it seems a
bit complicated to automate the setup if you have lots of accounts.

I'll probably just go with an API Gateway proxy for the SNS webhooks in one
account and add the webhook setup for the other accounts to their
Cloudformation templates.

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bifrost
Sortof unimpressed since PagerDuty already has pretty good Slack/Chat
integration.

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dlphn___xyz
when will this chatbot fad die out?

~~~
smt88
This is a notification bot. It's not a conversational interface.

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mooreds
Tl;dr: Add alerts to your slack channel (or chime, if you use that) from AWS
services by essentially adding another target to an SNS topic.

List of supported services:
[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/chatbot/latest/adminguide/relate...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/chatbot/latest/adminguide/related-
services.html)

Only a few services supported right now (is in beta) but the big one
(cloudwatch alarms) is.

