ChatOps

ChatOps

by Jason Hand
Released August 2016
Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
ISBN: 9781491962305

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Book description

Increase efficiency with ChatOps, an approach that helps IT teams collaborate and perform daily actions from a unique, turbocharged chatroom. With this 75-page report, you’ll learn how your team can query information, work together on solutions, enter commands with bots and scripts, and comment on the work—all in one place and in real time.

Author Jason Hand takes you through key ChatOps concepts and technologies, as well as the challenges you need to consider as you start to use persistent group chat as your operational interface. You’ll learn how ChatOps can provide people throughout your department and organization with the context they need to understand how—and why—their operations are evolving.

With this report, you’ll explore:

  • Key benefits including increased automation and sharing of domain knowledge
  • How ChatOps relies on APIs to leverage tools and services
  • Why a familiar chat interface helps people engage with the process
  • Common uses and tasks, including read-only data retrieval
  • How persistent data from group chat can enhance other processes, such as compliance and post-mortems
  • The use of existing chat services, third-party integrations, and bots in ChatOps implementations
  • Several options to help your team get started with ChatOps

Publisher resources

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Table of contents

  1. Foreword
  2. 1. Introduction
    1. What’s in the Report
    2. What’s Not in the Report
    3. The Author
  3. 2. The Culture Challenge
    1. Benefits of ChatOps
    2. Champion of Change
  4. 3. Team Collaboration
    1. All of Us Are Smarter than Any of Us
    2. Don’t Repeat Yourself
  5. 4. Roles and Responsibilities of DevOps (or Ops) Engineers
    1. Goal Alignment
    2. Spreading Institutional Knowledge
    3. Learning Organization
  6. 5. Common Uses and Tasks
    1. Pushing Context
    2. “Read-Only” Retrieval of Data
    3. Bidirectional Interactions
    4. Third-Party Integrations
    5. Custom Scripted Tasks
  7. 6. Existing Technology
    1. Chat Services
      1. HipChat
      2. Flowdock
      3. Slack
    2. Additional Open Source and Commercial Options
    3. Third-Party Integrations
    4. Bots
      1. Hubot
      2. Lita
      3. Errbot
      4. Cog
      5. Yetibot
    5. Instructing Chatbots
    6. Bot and Language-Agnostic Libraries
    7. Syntax: Command Versus Natural Language
  8. 7. Getting Started and Examples
    1. Proof of Concept
    2. Low-Hanging Fruit
    3. Without Chatbots
      1. Repository Notifications
      2. Continuous Integration (CI) Notifications
      3. Incident Management Notifications
      4. Call and Response
    4. With Chatbots
      1. Read
      2. Create
      3. Update
      4. Delete
      5. Combination of CRUD Operations
  9. 8. A World Connected by API
    1. A New Interface
    2. A Growing Ecosystem
  10. 9. Infrastructure as Conversation
    1. Managing Infrastructure as a Collaborative Process
    2. Empowering Engineers
  11. 10. The Convergence of Conversation, Context, and Action
    1. More Informed, Responsive, and Efficient
    2. Real-Time Awareness
  12. 11. Make Work Visible
    1. Leverage a Bot
    2. Spread Tribal Knowledge
    3. Familiar and Predictable
    4. Building Empathy
  13. 12. Security and Safety
    1. Security Through Obscurity
    2. Community to the Rescue
  14. 13. Importance of Persistent Data
    1. Logs
    2. Compliance
    3. Wikis
    4. Onboarding
    5. Postmortems, Retrospectives, and Learning Reviews
  15. 14. Signal Versus Noise
    1. Alert Fatigue
    2. Make Adjustments
    3. Set the Tone
  16. 15. Reliance on Third-Party Chat Service
    1. Run It On-Premise
    2. Single Point of Failure
  17. 16. Selling ChatOps to Your Boss
    1. Redesigning IT’s Role and Purpose
    2. Exposing Conversations and Collaboration
  18. 17. Beyond the Horizon: The Future of ChatOps
    1. Advancements in Technology
    2. Final Thoughts

Product information

  • Title: ChatOps
  • Author(s): Jason Hand
  • Release date: August 2016
  • Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
  • ISBN: 9781491962305