Sunday, August 14, 2022

chat ops: yetibot, kibiya, AirBnB

https://kubiya.ai

AirBnB Writes Their Own:


Everyone associated with incident management hates all of the systems they are forced to use as part of the tracking workflow, with their most vehement, white-hot hatred reserved for Jira.  So everyone tries desperately to avoid Jira any way they can and many on-call folks write or integrate what they label "automation" to push an incident lifecycle through Jira for them.  I perceive one of the secrets of the success of PagerDuty and Slack is their lighter, friendlier, easier methods of implementing an incident workflow and built-in, friendly integrations with ServiceNow and Jira.

About 15,000 internet relay chat (IRC) free, open-source "bots" that have now mostly all become Slack bots are used by service operators to facilitate communication, diagnosis, resolution, and incident workflow data entry via chat.  However, because very few developers can read code and treat each problem they encounter as new, buggy code to be written, more bots are written every day.  AirBnB has published their adventure, writing a slack chatbot that can drive PagerDuty and Jira through a few tasks as a side effect of chatting about incidents.  Their bot has no real automation, but it has a few slack forms to facilitate Jira workflow data entry.  It seems they have only just started developing their bot.

I, personally, know of two very powerful automation platforms based on Slack bots that are worth learning and using. Yetibot is a free, open source shell environment with a rich set of commands, scripting statements, Unix Pipes, etc.  It has fantastic integration with Slack and Jira (among many other systems). If you are looking for a free, powerful chat bot, check out Yetibot.  Another commercial (non-free) chat bot that provides true automation, structured workflow, and extremely safe, powerful built-in modules and interfaces is kubiya. Kubiya provides guided data entry and safe, restricted self-service infrastructure automation workflows in slack.  The coolest part about Kubiya is that it hides many of the details of Terraform, complex policies, and enables a much-more natural way to just "chat" (type at) a system that will guide and assist the human through completing relatively difficult tasks.  For commercial enterprises with overworked service operators, Kubiya is definitely worth evaluating.

No comments: