AWS Chatbot sends range of alerts to DevOps teams

The recently launched AWS Chatbot acts an interactive agent for DevOps teams who are seeking to monitor resources across their AWS ecosystems. A key feature of the Chatbot is that it can be integrated into the teams’ Slack channels or their Amazon Chime chat rooms, enabling it to send through security or resource alerts.

Originally launched in beta at the end of the July, the bot is able to receive notifications from AWS Systems Manager, in addition to those already established for Amazon Cloud Watch, AWS Health, AWS Budgets, AWS Security Hub, Amazon GuardDuty and AWS CloudFormation. 

These capabilities mean that in addition to DevOps teams receiving chat room messages about issues such as billing and cost management, operating metrics for AWS services, and security threat and compliance alerts, the new Systems Manager links also provide notifications about configuration compliance or status changes for a Run Command.

The Chatbot service uses Amazon’s Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) to deliver the alerts. Amazon SNS is a web service that coordinates and manages all the delivery of messages to AWS clients and subscribing endpoints, meaning the bot is clearly intended for use solely within an AWS environment.

AWS’s product manager Ilya Bezdelev outlined the rationale behind the bot, saying: “DevOps teams widely use chat rooms as communications hubs where team members interact - both with one another and with the systems that they operate.

“Bots 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 chat rooms where the entire team can see the notifications and discuss next steps.”

There is no additional charge to use the Chatbot and it is available in any public AWS region.