AWS Chatbot: Bring AWS into your Slack channel

If you work on a DevOps team, you already know that monitoring systems and responding to events require major context switching. In the course of a day—or a single notification—teams might need to cycle among Slack, email, text messages, chat rooms, phone calls, video conversations and the AWS console. Synthesizing the data from all those different sources isn’t just hard work; it’s inefficient.

Enter AWS Chatbot. In Slack, this powerful integration is designed to streamline ChatOps, making it easier for teams to manage just about every operational activity, whether it’s monitoring, system management or CI/CD workflows.

“Many DevOps teams rely on Slack to collaborate with both their team members and the systems they operate. By integrating AWS Chatbot with Slack, we’ve reduced the need to context switch and made it easier for teams who use Slack to monitor and interact with their AWS resources from within their Slack channels.” —Kurt Kufeld, VP, AWS Platform

DevOps teams can receive real-time notifications that help them monitor their systems from within Slack. That means they can address situations before they become full-blown issues, whether it’s a budget deviation, a system overload or a security event. The most important alerts from CloudWatch Alarms can be displayed as rich messages with graphs. Teams can set which AWS services send notifications where so developers aren’t bombarded with unnecessary information.

All this happens securely from within the Slack channels you already use every day.

When something does require your attention, Slack plus AWS Chatbot helps you move work forward more efficiently. In a Slack channel, you can receive a notification, retrieve diagnostic information, initiate workflows by invoking AWS Lambda functions, create AWS support cases or issue a command.

“With AWS Chatbot, we’ve aggregated various notifications—such as application deployments, infrastructure provisioning, and performance monitoring—directly into Slack so our team can quickly take action from where they’re already working. Not only does this speed up our development time, but it improves the overall development experience for the team.” — Kentaro Suzuki, Solution Architect – LIFULL Co., Ltd.

Sounds easy, right? It’s even easier to set permissions for individual chat rooms and channels, determining who can take these actions through AWS Identity Access Management. AWS Chatbot comes loaded with pre-configured permissions templates, which of course can be customized to fit your organization.

To top it all off, thanks to an intuitive setup wizard, AWS Chatbot only takes a few minutes to configure in your workspace. You simply go to the AWS console, authorize with Slack and add the Chatbot to your channel. (You can read step-by-step instructions on the AWS DevOps Blog here.) And that means your teams are well on their way to better communication and faster incident resolutions.