Ask HN: HN Devs, to ChatOps or not to ChatOps?

[rashcroft]

Hey HN Devs,

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?

[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 → pyzon]

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?