AWS Chatbot announces support for management of AWS resources from Slack General Availability

Feel free to tag me on X, formerly known as Twitter, and follow my team on there, too. In this tutorial, we will be combining it with the OpenAI API (ChatGPT) to create a voice chatbot. We will go over how to deploy and customize the bot on Vonage Cloud Runtime which eliminates the need to manage servers and hosting on your own. The Vonage Voice API is a tool for developers to integrate voice-calling capabilities into their applications. With the Vonage Voice API, developers can create applications, such as call screening systems, virtual assistants, conference calling platforms, and customer support hotlines. You can send your comments to the AWS Chatbot team by typing @aws feedback  in your Slack channel.

Streamline your AWS cost monitoring efforts with CloudForecast – the easy-to-use AWS cost management tool for busy Engineering, SRE, DevOps, Infra, and Tech teams. Safely configure AWS resources, resolve incidents, and run tasks from Microsoft Teams and Slack without context switching to other AWS management tools. 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. Another part of what makes the OpenAI team feel confident using Slack to power their work is Slack’s security features. OpenAI uses Slack’s Enterprise Grid for its message retention and admin control capabilities.

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. 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.

The company has over 170 Slack Connect channels and has sent over five million messages since becoming a Slack customer in 2018. The AWS managed AdministratorAccess policy is applied by default if this is not set. After configuring the alarm, as soon as your EC2 instances’ CPU usage crosses the threshold, you receive the following notification on your Slack channel. Our customer obsession at Aircall drives us to continually add value for our clients. By improving our internal processes and tools, we ensure that we can deliver the best possible experience to our customers, even when challenges arise. Our commitment to sustainability means that we are not only focused on immediate solutions but also on long-term impacts and efficiencies.

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. Moreover, you can run AWS CLI commands to retrieve details of all of the CloudWatch alarms in your account. If you have an existing AWS administrator user, you can access the AWS Chatbot console with no additional permissions. AWS recommends that you grant only the permissions required to perform a task for other users. For more information, see Apply least-privilege permissions in the AWS Identity and Access Management User Guide.

Incident management at Aircall

To get started with AWS Chatbot, visit the AWS Chatbot product page. 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. Read the FAQs to learn more about AWS Chatbot notifications and integrations. Collaborate, retrieve observability telemetry, and respond quickly to incidents, security findings, and other alerts for applications in your AWS environment. Selecting a different region will change the language and content of slack.com. The Support Command Permissions policy applies only to the

AWS Support service.

The ARN of the IAM role that defines the permissions for AWS Chatbot. 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. 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.

• 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.
• Follow the prompts from AWS Chatbot to fill out the support case with its needed parameters.
• Find answers faster and make customers happier, all from one place.

Teams can set which AWS services send notifications where so developers aren’t bombarded with unnecessary information. The IAM policies will be consistent across

chat channels that support commands in your AWS Chatbot service. DevOps teams widely use Slack channels as communication hubs where team members interact—both with one another and with the systems they operate.

However, as our operations scaled, it became clear that this manual approach was insufficient. Steps were frequently skipped, and communication became fragmented across multiple channels. This not only extended incident response times but also delayed crucial communications between our engineers, support teams, and clients. 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.

Improve incident management response times

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 AWS Chatbot, you can use chat rooms to monitor and respond to events in your AWS Cloud. CloudForecast makes the tedious work of AWS cost management less tedious for your engineering team. If you’re looking for an easy and quick way to manage and socialize AWS costs to your engineering team, be sure to check out CloudForecast and our Slack integration. We offer a 30-day Free Trial with no Credit Card required and a Free Community Plan.

Run AWS Command Line Interface commands from Microsoft Teams and Slack channels to remediate your security findings. When you pass the logical ID of this resource to the intrinsic Ref function, Ref returns the ARN of the configuration created. You

can define your own policy with greater restrictions, using this policy as a template. The log shows a command that a user can copy, paste, and edit to re-run the query for

viewing logs.

Recognizing the need for change, we evaluated various industry options to find a solution that met our requirements and customer-centric approach while being cost-effective. After thorough discussions, we chose to develop a custom in-house solution. This solution leverages AWS Systems Manager (SSM) for incident management, aws chatbot slack our proprietary Slack Bot (Airbot), and our extensive knowledge of serverless computing within the cloud. Realizing the need for a more efficient system, we explored various industry solutions. Our goal was to find an approach that adhered to our requirements, maintained our customer-centric focus, and was cost-effective.

Test AWS Chatbot in Slack and get help

For this purpose, we’ve developed a robust, custom solution for handling incidents. This solution leverages our deep knowledge of serverless architecture and our creativity, allowing us to act quickly and efficiently when problems arise. Everyone knows their role, communication is clear and effective, and customer impact is minimized.

Emojis allow team members to say things without starting a new thread. Emojis can indicate that messages have been read, that work on a project is in progress https://chat.openai.com/ or simply encourage coworkers for a job well done. Collaborating within channels empowers OpenAI to find faster, more accurate solutions for customer needs.

Q. Does AWS Chatbot process data outside the AWS Region where I am using AWS Chatbot? For example, if you enter @aws lambda get-function with no further arguments,

the Chatbot requests the function name. 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 will execute the automation runbook and provide notification updates in the channel as the automation runbook progresses. If you would like to add AWS Chatbot access to an existing user or group, you can choose from allowed Chatbot actions in IAM. CloudForecast’s focused daily AWS cost monitoring reports to help busy engineering teams understand their AWS costs, rapidly respond to any overspends, and promote opportunities to save costs. Available in the Slack App Directory, CloudForecast’s Slack Integration simplifies managing AWS cost monitoring for your engineering teams. Directly through our app, leverage filters like AWS Tags, sub-accounts, and AWS Cost Categories to socialize AWS costs they own effectively among teams and catch potential AWS costs surprises early. Integrating chatbot directly with Slack ensures that all members have immediate access to important alerts and can execute necessary commands without leaving their communication platform.

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. Slack Connect allows OpenAI to move conversations with customers out of over-stuffed inboxes and into interactive channels.

Keep it in-house: Leveraging private files for image blocks with Slack’s Block Kit

By leveraging serverless architecture and optimising our resources, we ensure that our solutions are not only effective but also sustainable and cost-effective. In order to guarantee that incidents are resolved promptly we send a reminder message every hour if there are no new communications on the incident Slack channel. Start incident Workflow prompt where the user is required to fill the data.

AWS Chatbot doesn’t currently support service endpoints and there are no adjustable quotas. 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.

They’re the creators behind the wildly popular ChatGPT, a versatile AI chatbot that can, amongst many things, compose content and answer questions in a conversational manner. “Slack is central to how our company collaborates, for increasing velocity, and is integral to building with our customers. Below is a list of documents for the technologies demonstrated above and used on our Incident Management Tool.

In order to successfully test the configuration from the console, your role must also have permission to use the AWS KMS key. After you sign up for an AWS account, secure your AWS account root user, enable AWS IAM Identity Center, and create an administrative user so that you

don’t use the root user for everyday tasks. If you do not have an AWS account, complete the following steps to create one. Get started with AWS Chatbot by visiting the AWS Management Chatbot Console and by downloading the AWS Chatbot app from the Microsoft Teams marketplace or Slack App Directory.

Add more parameters for the initial command with @aws function-name

name. AWS Chatbot parses your commands and helps you complete the

correct syntax so it can run the complete AWS CLI command. You can run commands using AWS CLI syntax directly in chat channels. AWS Chatbot enables you to retrieve diagnostic information, configure AWS resources, and run workflows.

For more information, see Running AWS CLI commands from chat channels and Understanding permissions. Quickly establish integrations and security permissions between AWS resources and chat channels to receive preselected or event-driven notifications in real time. 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.

AWS Cloud Operations & Migrations Blog

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. 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. To create an AWS Support case from Slack, enter @aws support create-case and follow the AWS Chatbot prompts to provide it with all the required parameters.

Enterprise Grid includes Slack’s most robust security features, like data encryption, SAML-based single sign-on and granular app management. You only pay for the underlying services that you use, in the same manner as if you were using them without AWS Chatbot. Make sure to delete any resources that you do not plan to use in the future to avoid incurring costs. To receive a notification when a Lambda function fails to execute, create a CloudWatch alarm, select AWS Lambda namespace, Errors as metric name and select the Lambda function to watch. We would like to receive notifications on Slack channel when the CPU utilization of EC2 instances reaches the threshold of 70%.

They can also share their screen to add more visuals to the conversation. In addition to Slack, OpenAI is exploring using other Salesforce products to improve the customer experience. Integrating data from Service Cloud and Sales Cloud into Slack would allow OpenAI to access a 360-degree view of the customer right where they’re working. The ARNs of the SNS topics that deliver notifications to AWS Chatbot.

Now that we have initial set up ready, let’s discuss a few use cases where you can use the bot with other AWS services. The journey with the Aircall Incident Management Tool exemplifies our commitment to innovation, sustainability, and customer satisfaction. We look forward to continuing this journey, always striving to exceed our customers’ expectations while maintaining a responsible and cost-effective approach to our technological advancements.

This success motivates us to continue enhancing our internal tools and automating our processes. As Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), we are passionate about automation and constantly seek opportunities to streamline our workflows. Sustainability and cost-efficiency are also key factors in all our decisions.

• In the pop-up, give your instance a name, choose your AWS region, assign a Vonage phone number to this project, and enter your OpenAI API secret.
• For more information about AWS Chatbot’s permissions, see Understanding permissions.
• Additionally once a workflow is started a small input box appears to fill in the above described data.

When you have an operational event or want to check in on your application’s health, you can use AWS Chatbot to show details about CloudWatch Alarms in your account. 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. Cloud Runtime Once the workspace is open, you’ll see that the sample app has already been deployed and is ready to go! Call the Vonage phone number, ask a question, and you should receive an answer. Create IstanceYou’ll be directed to a new page where you are prompted to select a language. After signing into your Vonage developer account, go to the Voice ChatGPT Bot (Java) CodeHub page.

Notice that all steps are non blocking, if one step fails during API Call to the service the remaining resources can still be created. We understand that in the world of tech, even with the best intentions and robust systems, things can occasionally go wrong. Our commitment is to ensure that when issues arise, they are resolved swiftly and with minimal impact on our customers. Everything runs on Slack’s secure infrastructure, meeting the same compliance standards as Slack itself. Get essential customer context and sell smarter by summarizing account channels.

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 allows the entire team to see notifications and act on them through commands to chatbots.

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

logs. 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. For example, someone can add a Slackbot to a channel and ask internal teams or customers to use the “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” emoji to provide feedback. If you encounter issues when trying to receive notifications, click troubleshooting AWS Chatbot documentation. As with all the other tools we provide we engage with our clients, the engineering and the support teams to listen to usage feedback and define the future improvements of the incident automation tool.

To get this ID, open Slack, right click on the channel name in the left pane, then choose Copy Link. When someone tries to disable AWS CloudTrail logging, such events get captured as findings on GuradDuty console. You receive following notification on Slack channel when the specific Lambda fails to execute. To look up timeout and memory size parameters for a Lambda function. Additionally once a workflow is started a small input box appears to fill in the above described data.

Find answers faster and make customers happier, all from one place. Solve incidents using solutions from across your org, all without ever leaving Slack. Choose Show error logs to filter results to only log entries containing “error”, “exception”, or “fail”. You can use AWS Chatbot to look up information about your resources. If you don’t have one already, you can sign up today and start building with free credit. Once you have an account, you can find your API Key and API Secret at the top of the Vonage API Dashboard.

The OpenAI team uses Slack huddles to collaborate quickly and further eliminate the need for meetings. Huddles are a way to communicate through audio or video within a Slack channel or direct message. Anyone in a channel can come and go as they please within a huddle.

You can configure AWS Chatbot for multiple AWS accounts in the same chat channel. When you work

with AWS Chatbot for the first time in that channel, it will ask you which account you want to use. CloudWatch alarm notifications show buttons in chat client notifications to view logs related to the

alarm.

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. 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. To change the default account in the channel, enter @aws set default-account

and select the account from the list.

Using Slack Connect to collaborate directly with customers

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 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. The list of IAM policy ARNs that are applied as channel guardrails. The AWS managed ‘AdministratorAccess’ policy is applied as a default if this is not set. 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.

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. Previously, AWS customers could only monitor AWS resources and retrieve diagnostic information using AWS Chatbot. In this post, we described seven use cases where you can use AWS Chatbot to receive notifications on your Slack channel from different AWS services. This helps you proactively detect and fix issues in your infrastructure and avoid any major outages, security breaches, and cost deviations.

If you have existing chat channels using the AWS Chatbot, you can reconfigure them in a few steps

to support the AWS CLI. Finally we are going over our Slack integration, where our Slack bot listens to the events, assumes a role on AWS and is able to perform the input steps for the incident management. As described in the requirements above the incident management tool was implemented using a Serverless architecture within AWS ecosystem, Confluence and Slack. The tool is composed of services independent of each other that are meant to work in parallel without a single point of failure. The diagrams below describes our current infrastructure setup for the incident management tool.

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. 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.

In the figure below is an example of the custom Slack bot response to the incident start action. Slack AI is offered as a paid add-on to Pro, Business+ and Enterprise plans. Users are not able to purchase it themselves — instead, a Slack admin can purchase it on behalf of your team. For pricing information or to learn more, please reach out to your Slack account executive, or talk to sales. Slack AI currently supports English, Spanish, and Japanese with support for additional languages coming later. Catch up in one click, and take some time to focus on the work that matters most.

“We at OpenAI use Slack every day, and it is critical to how we get work done here,” says Brad Lightcap, the chief operating officer of OpenAI. Throughout this influx of customers and growth to their business, OpenAI has relied on Slack for their collaboration needs. OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company that’s revolutionizing how the world perceives artificial intelligence.

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. 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. Type @aws describe cw alarms in us-west-1 to see all of the alarms in the US West Northern California region.

We use an automation document to start the different steps of our incident resolution plan, each step creates a list of resources that are required for our teams to collaborate. We use a mix of single isolated Lambda functions and a Step function workflow to enable the different automation. The diagram below shows the infrastructure we have for the incident automation process. 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.

Perfect for staying informed on channels you can’t always look out for, freeing up time, and keeping sidebars tidy. When you finish providing required parameters, AWS Chatbot will ask you to confirm creation of the case. 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. In the pop-up, give your instance a name, choose your AWS region, assign a Vonage phone number to this project, and enter your OpenAI API secret. He has keen interests in providing simple and safe user experiences for AWS customers and expanding the capabilities of ChatOps via AWS Chatbot.

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. You can also run AWS CLI commands directly in chat channels using AWS Chatbot. You can retrieve diagnostic information, configure AWS resources, Chat GPT and run workflows. To run a command, AWS Chatbot checks that all required parameters are entered. If any are missing, AWS Chatbot prompts you for the required information. 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.

We focus on improving our methods to manage uncertainty, minimize client impact, and learn from every incident. To get started, first configure Slack notifications for CloudWatch Alarms for a Lambda function via AWS Chatbot. Then, make your function fail to trigger the CloudWatch Alarm to go into the alarm state.

This tool works in a symbiotic collaboration with our self made Slack Bot, this bot listens to events and is able to trigger responses on our cloud platform as well as making api calls to some of our services. Today, we introduced a new feature that enables DevOps teams to run AWS commands and actions from Slack. 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. 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.