Manage AWS resources in your Slack channels with AWS Chatbot AWS Cloud Operations & Migrations Blog

For private Slack channels, find the URL of the channel by opening the context (right-click) menu on the channel name in the left sidebar in Slack, and choosing Copy link. To follow along with this example, you need an AWS account, as well as a Slack channel to configure with AWS Chatbot. AWS Chatbot is available free of charge and you only pay for the AWS resources you use, such as CloudWatch Log Insights that is used for querying logs. This guide will demonstrate just a few ways developers and IT professionals can improve their cloud-centric workflows by monitoring and managing their AWS environments from Slack. AWS Chatbot doesn’t currently support service endpoints and there are no adjustable quotas.

The generative AI assistant can take several factors — such as frequency of use —  into consideration while answering queries about applications, potentially suggesting relevant databases or other service offerings, the CEO added. You can either select a public channel from the dropdown list or paste the URL or ID of a private channel. An AWS and Slack integrated ChatOps environment centralizes teams, tools, and collaboration into a single place that enables teams to ship code faster, reduce incident response times, and increase visibility and collective learning.

There may be service charges for using this feature to query and show

logs. 81% of developers believe adopting new tools is critical to an organization’s success. But this preference for constantly adding to their toolbox can also complicate cloud operation workflows because it requires context switching, which increases the time it takes to execute tasks, resolve incidents, and communicate. As engineering and IT departments onboard new technology, they need automation to optimize these efforts. If you have existing chat channels using the AWS Chatbot, you can reconfigure them in a few steps

to support the AWS CLI.

Q can also be used to gain insights from Word documents, Excel or CSV files by uploading it directly at the interface, AWS said. The assistant also can be used to raise and update requests across applications such as ServiceNow and Jira. Ilya Bezdelev is the Principal Product Manager for AWS User Experience, where he focuses on conversational interfaces.

In this post, I walked you through the steps to set up an AWS Chatbot configuration and securely run AWS CLI commands to configure AWS resources from Slack. Moreover, you can run AWS CLI commands to retrieve details of all of the CloudWatch alarms in your account. 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. 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.

In November 2021, we announced the preview of this feature update to the AWS Chatbot. In addition to the preview feature set, we are introducing improvements that allow customers to specify multiple guardrail policies in a chat configuration, giving more control in securing channel permissions. Support for over 40 applications and services are supported out of the box. 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.

Once the function invocation completes, AWS Chatbot will show the output of the Invoke call. You can send your comments to the AWS Chatbot team by typing @aws feedback  in your Slack channel. You

can define your own policy with greater restrictions, using this policy as a template. You can enter a complete AWS CLI command with all the parameters, or you can enter the command

without parameters and AWS Chatbot prompts you for missing parameters.

Previously, AWS customers could only monitor AWS resources and retrieve diagnostic information using AWS Chatbot. To create an AWS Support case from Slack, type @aws support create-case and follow the AWS Chatbot prompts to provide it with all the required parameters. The scope of AWS Chatbot’s permissions in your account is defined by an IAM role that you can create using policy templates in Chat PG the AWS Chatbot console or by specifying custom IAM policies with granular permissions that meet your needs. If you already use AWS Chatbot for sending notifications to Slack, you must create a new IAM role or update the existing one with additional permissions to be able to run commands. Today, we introduced a new feature that enables DevOps teams to run AWS commands and actions from Slack.

Teams can set which AWS services send notifications where so developers aren’t bombarded with unnecessary information. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. To trigger a workflow or a runbook from Slack, you can invoke a Lambda function by running @aws lambda invoke FUNCTION_NAME. 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.

Tutorial: Get started with Slack

Channel members must select an IAM role to run commands for the channel configuration with user roles-based AWS Chatbot configuration permissions configured in Task 1. To choose or switch a user role at any time, type @aws switch-roles in the Slack channel. Select the configured AWS account link and navigate to the console to choose an IAM role.

Q has additional capabilities, which can be accessed from CodeCatalyst, to help developers ship features faster. When you finish providing required parameters, AWS Chatbot will ask you to confirm creation of the case. To get started, first configure Slack notifications for CloudWatch aws chatbot slack Alarms for a Lambda function via AWS Chatbot. Then, make your function fail to trigger the CloudWatch Alarm to go into the alarm state. You can quickly access logs for Lambda invocations using the new AWS Chatbot action buttons on CloudWatch Alarm notifications in Slack.

AWS Chatbot: Bring AWS into your Slack channel

The log shows a command that a user can copy, paste, and edit to re-run the query for

viewing logs. If you find you are unable to run commands, you may need to switch your user role or contact your administrator to find out what actions are permissible. You can specify parameters with either a double hyphen (–option) or a single hyphen (-option). This allows you to use a mobile device to run commands without running into issues with the mobile device automatically converting a double hyphen to a long dash.

Synthesizing the data from all those different sources isn’t just hard work; it’s inefficient. To change the default account in the channel, enter @aws set default-account

and select the account from the list. For any AWS Chatbot role that creates AWS Support cases, you need to attach the AWS Support command permissions policy to the role. For existing roles, you will

need to attach the policy in the IAM console. CloudWatch alarm notifications show buttons in chat client notifications to view logs related to the

alarm.

Supercharge your sales teams with the new Slack and Salesforce integration

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. 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.

Then, run the @aws lambda list-functions

command, find the function name you need, and re-run the first command with the corrected option. AWS Chatbot parses your commands and helps you complete the

correct syntax so it can run the complete AWS CLI command. DevOps teams widely use Slack channels as communication hubs where team members interact—both with one another and with the systems they operate. Chatbots help facilitate these interactions, delivering important notifications and relaying commands from users back to systems. Many teams even prefer that operational events and notifications come through Slack channels.

This lets DevOps teams use chat channels as the primary means of collaboration when monitoring events, analyzing incidents, and operating AWS workloads. If you have a large number of chat channels and you want to have the same command

permissions across multiple channels, you can apply the configured AWS Chatbot role to any of your

other chat channels without further modification. The IAM policies will be consistent across

chat channels that support commands in your AWS Chatbot service. For example, if you enter @aws lambda get-function with no further arguments,

the Chatbot requests the function name.

You can also run AWS CLI commands directly in chat channels using AWS Chatbot. You can retrieve diagnostic information, configure AWS resources, and run workflows. To run a command, AWS Chatbot checks that all required parameters are entered. AWS Chatbot

then confirms if the command is permissible by checking the command against what is allowed by the configured IAM roles and the channel guardrail policies. For more information, see Running AWS CLI commands from chat channels and Understanding permissions.

Configuring commands support on an existing chat channel

He cares about making DevOps teams more effective and helping them minimize the mean time to recovery using collaborative ChatOps on AWS. Choose Show error logs to filter results to only log entries containing “error”, “exception”, or “fail”. Finally, if you also want to receive notifications, such as CloudWatch Alarms or AWS Budgets, select SNS topics that those notifications are published to.

When you work

with AWS Chatbot for the first time in that channel, it will ask you which account you want to use. To perform actions in your chat channels, you must first have the appropriate permissions. For more information about AWS Chatbot’s permissions, see Understanding permissions.

Type @aws describe cw alarms in us-west-1 to see all of the alarms in the US West Northern California region. AWS Chatbot will understand your input, map it to matching AWS CLI commands, and ask for a confirmation. In this post, I will show you AWS Chatbot configuration steps and share sample DevOps use cases to configure your AWS resources using AWS CLI commands from Slack channels. You can configure AWS Chatbot for multiple AWS accounts in the same chat channel.

For more information about AWS Chatbot AWS Region availability and quotas,

see AWS Chatbot endpoints and quotas. AWS Chatbot supports using all supported AWS services in the

Regions where they are available. Abhijit Barde is the Principal Product Manager for AWS Chatbot, where he focuses on making it easy for all AWS users to discover, monitor, and interact with AWS resources using conversational interfaces.

With this feature, customers can manage AWS resources directly from their Slack channels. Customers can securely run AWS CLI commands to scale EC2 instances, run AWS Systems Manager runbooks, and change AWS Lambda concurrency limits. Customers can now monitor, operate, and troubleshoot AWS workloads https://chat.openai.com/ from Slack channels without switching context between Slack and other AWS Management Tools. Additionally, you can configure channel permissions to match your security and compliance needs by modifying account-level settings, using predefined permission templates, and using guardrail policies.

• If you already use AWS Chatbot for sending notifications to Slack, you must create a new IAM role or update the existing one with additional permissions to be able to run commands.
• The most important alerts from CloudWatch Alarms can be displayed as rich messages with graphs.
• DevOps and engineering teams are increasingly moving their operations, system management, and CI/CD workflows to chat applications to streamline activities in chat channels and improve team collaboration.
• AWS Chatbot customers can do this by running AWS CLI commands and AWS System Manager Automation Runbooks from Slack channels.
• When you finish providing required parameters, AWS Chatbot will ask you to confirm creation of the case.

AWS Chatbot enables you to retrieve diagnostic information, configure AWS resources, and run workflows. Running AWS commands from Slack using AWS Chatbot expands the toolkit your team uses to respond to operational events and interact with AWS. In this post, I walked you through some of the use cases where AWS Chatbot helped reduce the time to recovery while also increasing transparency within DevOps teams. Type @aws cloudwatch describe-alarms –region us-east-1 to see all alarms in North Virginia Region. The bot will return an image with CloudWatch alarms and metric trends as well as the standard output of the CloudWatch DescribeAlarms API call.

With this feature, customers can now monitor, operate, and troubleshoot AWS workloads from Slack channels without switching context between Slack and other AWS Management Tools. Customers can securely run AWS CLI commands to perform common DevOps tasks, such as scaling EC2 instances, running Systems Manager runbooks, and changing Lambda concurrency limits. Additionally, service administrators can use policy guardrails as well as account-level and user-role permissions to meet their security and compliance needs. DevOps and engineering teams are increasingly moving their operations, system management, and CI/CD workflows to chat applications to streamline activities in chat channels and improve team collaboration. AWS customers have used the AWS Chatbot to monitor and retrieve diagnostic information. After receiving the information in the Slack channel, AWS customers had to switch to the AWS Console or AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) to remediate the incidents and configure their AWS environments.

AWS Chatbot will execute the automation runbook and provide notification updates in the channel as the automation runbook progresses. You can use AWS Chatbot to change the AWS Lambda function’s maximum simultaneous execution capacity limit. Selecting a different region will change the language and content of slack.com.

You can retrieve diagnostic information, invoke AWS Lambda functions, and create support cases right from your Slack channels, so your team can collaborate and respond to events faster. AWS Chatbot supports commands using the already familiar AWS Command Line Interface syntax that you can use from Slack on desktop or mobile devices. When prompted for the reserved-concurrent-executions parameter, type @aws 10 as the input value. The following example shows the sample interaction and the command output on the execution of the AWS CLI command.

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. AWS Chatbot will also provide an option to refine the AWS CLI command results by prompting you to rerun the AWS CLI command with optional parameters.

Q can also help developers choose the right AWS EC2 instance they want to run, the company said, adding that the generative AI assistant can also be used to troubleshoot and solve errors directly from within the console. AWS Chatbot will show the first 30 log entries starting from the beginning of the alarm evaluation period. In the top-right corner, select the Slack workspace to configure and choose Allow. Your Slack workspace installs the AWS Slack App, and the AWS account that you logged in with is now authorized to communicate with your Slack workspace.

This allows the entire team to see notifications and act on them through commands to chatbots. Today, we are announcing the public preview of a new feature that allows you to use AWS Chatbot to manage AWS resources and remediate issues in AWS workloads by running AWS CLI commands from Slack channels. Previously, you could only monitor AWS resources and retrieve diagnostic information using AWS Chatbot. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability (GA) of a feature that allows AWS Chatbot customers to manage AWS resources and remediate issues in AWS workloads from their Slack channels. AWS Chatbot customers can do this by running AWS CLI commands and AWS System Manager Automation Runbooks from Slack channels.

This additional semantic information is captured as vector embeddings, allowing Q to provide highly relevant results which are tailored to your specific company and industry,” Wood added. He has keen interests in providing simple and safe user experiences for AWS customers and expanding the capabilities of ChatOps via AWS Chatbot. AWS Chatbot will run the AWS CLI command and show the output of the AWS CLI command. All this happens securely from within the Slack channels you already use every day.

The Support Command Permissions policy applies only to the

AWS Support service. Follow the prompts from AWS Chatbot to fill out the support case with its needed parameters. When

you complete the case information entry, AWS Chatbot asks for confirmation. Q can also be used from within the console to troubleshoot network-related issues. “Q also uses generative AI to understand and capture the semantic information which makes your business unique.