Using Slack AWS Integration to Streamline Decision-Making with AWS Chatbot

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. Run AWS Command Line Interface commands from Microsoft Teams and Slack channels to remediate your security findings. 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 walked you through some of the use cases where AWS Chatbot helped reduce the time to recovery while also increasing transparency within DevOps teams. 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 aws chatbot slack parameters. Implementing Slack AWS integrations within your team channels allows you to maximize cloud-saving opportunities and implement infrastructure changes instantly. Real-time integration solutions are essential for DevOps teams to have easy access to the data to instantly make informed decisions.

81% of developers believe adopting new tools is critical to an organization’s success. As engineering and IT departments onboard new technology, they need automation to optimize these efforts. Safely configure AWS resources, resolve incidents, and run tasks from Microsoft Teams and Slack without context switching to other AWS management tools.

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Customers can now monitor, operate, and troubleshoot AWS workloads 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, https://chat.openai.com/ and using guardrail policies. 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.

• Chatbots help facilitate these interactions, delivering important notifications and relaying commands from users back to systems.
• Finally, if you also want to receive notifications, such as CloudWatch Alarms or AWS Budgets, select SNS topics that those notifications are published to.
• Then, make your function fail to trigger the CloudWatch Alarm to go into the alarm state.
• This allows the entire team to see notifications and act on them through commands to chatbots.

Our Generative AI Competency was our largest competency launch in the history of the AWS Partner Network. Now with the pipeline, it’s predicted to be our fastest-growing competency ever because of the customer demand. Over 80 percent of customers look at a partner’s competencies before deciding who to work with. That’s why Anthropic is using [AWS] Trainium [chips] to train their model to have the lowest cost for training. They’re also using [AWS] Inferentia [accelerators] for the inferences, which is where the majority of the workloads are going to be in the future for generative AI.

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. So making sure that our partners are developing the capabilities, developing the competencies, and thinking through customer impact. I would say partners have to move faster than they ever have before to meet the customers’ expectations. So that means that customers’ expectation of our partners to have generative AI skills, to have generative AI offerings, to have those impact stories, has gone up significantly.

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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. Customers are brainstorming hundreds of use cases, and they need partners to support them on this transformation. So by deeply understanding our security and responsible AI strategy, it’ll help alleviate the concerns that they have there. So responsible AI, making sure that we’ve got security built in, role-based access control so that individuals who shouldn’t have access to certain data are not getting insights through the application layer from that data. So not only do we have integrations with all of these partners in the application layer and at the model layer with Bedrock, we also are doing that in a way that has the highest price-to-performance ratio in the industry today. This is all tied to our goal of making sure that our customers are able to access the right outcomes for the lowest price in the market.

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. 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.

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. Moreover, you can run AWS CLI commands to retrieve details of all of the CloudWatch alarms in your account. 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.

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. 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. 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.

This blog will explore how you can tap into AWS Slack Integration with AWS Chatbot to enhance decision-making capabilities, significantly cutting down on delays and resource wastage. Read the FAQs to learn more about AWS Chatbot notifications and integrations. All this happens securely from within the Slack channels you already use every day.

When you finish providing required parameters, AWS Chatbot will ask you to confirm creation of the case. If you do not have an AWS account, complete the following steps to create one. With the capability to integrate with multiple chat platforms, it offers a streamlined approach to managing these changes directly through familiar communication tools.

Task 2. Select a user role from the Slack channel

Collaborate, retrieve observability telemetry, and respond quickly to incidents, security findings, and other alerts for applications in your AWS environment. You can send your comments to the AWS Chatbot team by typing @aws feedback  in your Slack channel. AWS Chatbot will execute the automation runbook and provide notification updates in the channel as the automation runbook progresses.

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. To trigger a workflow or a runbook from Slack, you can invoke a Lambda function by running @aws lambda invoke FUNCTION_NAME. In the top-right corner, select the Slack workspace to configure and choose Allow.

You can either select a public channel from the dropdown list or paste the URL or ID of a private channel. To follow along with this example, you need an AWS account, as well as a Slack channel to configure with AWS Chatbot. If you would like to add AWS Chatbot access to an existing user or group, you can choose from allowed Chatbot actions in IAM. 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.

Q. Does AWS Chatbot process data outside the AWS Region where I am using AWS Chatbot? 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. 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. 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 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. 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. For example, Datadog customers will be able to instrument Datadog with ease, maximize observability coverage, and receive guidance on incident troubleshooting and mitigate security risks for their cloud applications.

Setting up Amazon SNS topics

Read more about how Bonsai’s engineering team uses the Slack report to prevent end of the month AWS costs surprises. Gain near real-time visibility into anomalous spend with AWS Cost Anomaly Detection alert notifications Chat PG in Microsoft Teams and Slack by using AWS Chatbot. 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

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. 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.

It is what’s going to hold back customers from adopting generative AI, if they don’t have a clear understanding of how security and responsible AI is implemented. Ilya Bezdelev is the Principal Product Manager for AWS User Experience, where he focuses on conversational interfaces. He cares about making DevOps teams more effective and helping them minimize the mean time to recovery using collaborative ChatOps on AWS. AWS Chatbot will show the first 30 log entries starting from the beginning of the alarm evaluation period. 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.

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. 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 allows the entire team to see notifications and act on them through commands to chatbots. This lets DevOps teams use chat channels as the primary means of collaboration when monitoring events, analyzing incidents, and operating AWS workloads.

And they can’t wait months in order to start developing those because by then it’ll be too late. We’ve got partners such as Mission Cloud, MongoDB, Accenture, Deloitte and others who are demonstrating business impact. In order to get the competency, you have to have demonstrated business impact. So they went through those phases of learning, experimentation, actually deploying it and having customer impact in order to get the competency. We have a lot of free resources, training resources and educational information out there for our partners and for our customers. I’d encourage them to go to Skill Builder and look at the generative AI content that’s there so they can become familiar with it.

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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. 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.

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. The No. 1 message and theme is that our customers are expecting changes, responsiveness and impact in days or weeks, not in months. The pace of change and the pace of customer expectations is faster than it ever has been before. I just came from our London Summit that had 22,000 attendees and our Partner Summit had 1,000 partners.

Using Slack AWS Integration to Streamline Decision-Making with AWS Chatbot

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. You can read more about the wide range of AWS services supported in AWS ChatOps Documentation. 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.

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.

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. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. 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.

• 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.
• If you do not have an AWS account, complete the following steps to create one.
• Customers can now monitor, operate, and troubleshoot AWS workloads from Slack channels without switching context between Slack and other AWS Management Tools.
• AWS Chatbot customers can do this by running AWS CLI commands and AWS System Manager Automation Runbooks from Slack channels.
• Implementing Slack AWS integrations within your team channels allows you to maximize cloud-saving opportunities and implement infrastructure changes instantly.

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. Available in the Slack App Directory, CloudForecast’s Slack Integration simplifies managing AWS cost monitoring for your engineering teams.

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. 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.

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. 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.

You can quickly access logs for Lambda invocations using the new AWS Chatbot action buttons on CloudWatch Alarm notifications in Slack. 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. In order to successfully test the configuration from the console, your role must also have permission to use the AWS KMS key. 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.

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. 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. Finally, if you also want to receive notifications, such as CloudWatch Alarms or AWS Budgets, select SNS topics that those notifications are published to.