Why On-Call Teams Need ChatOps

Development and DevOps teams increasingly focus on collaboration for faster CI/CD and keeping their systems agile. But collaboration is easier said than done when teams are distributed across geography and time zones, and have their own culture.

When it comes to incident management, the importance of seamless, quick, two- way communication increases even more. Organizations need platforms that bring different teams together and help them stay in touch and contribute during all stages of the process- incident detection, response, and remediation.

When a service fails, a tool reports an incident to the operations team. Then, to follow up on this alert, the team has to:

• Create a ticket in the tool your engineering team is using with all the relevant information to help them diagnose the issue
• Escalate the ticket so other teams don’t miss it and you start looking into it right away
• Keep everyone in sync as the status of the incident changes

In order to automate the above-mentioned workflow, the monitoring tool should automatically sense the irregularities (e.g. error rates surpassing the threshold or a critical failure), send an alert to the DevOps team, generate a ticket in a tool such as Jira or ServiceNow with relevant information, and escalate it to the right person in the engineering team. As the responder works through the issue, the ticket must be updated, and everyone must be kept updated.

This involves the responder shifting from one application to the other just to keep everyone in the loop. This also means that the responder wastes a lot of time and loses focus just copying data from one place to another, when they should just be fixing the issue at hand.

The ChatOps solution

ChatOps is gaining popularity as a means to make incident management more agile and less taxing for the teams involved. Incident management is a popular use-case for ChatOps.

ChatOps allows for tools, teams and context to come together in a single, transparent workflow seamlessly and with little human effort. It brings the communication and the execution of software development and operational tasks to a common platform.

With the help of ChatOps, you can bring service owners, SREs and on-call engineers together to:

• Monitor, detect, and act upon incidents without switching between platforms, building a smooth incident management workflow
• Get sufficient incident data so ITOps and DevOps teams can acknowledge and resolve incidents directly
• Keep your teams updated on the status of incidents, minimizing alert noise
• Generate incident history for learning and post-incident reviews

You can consider using automated ChatOps tools to further accelerate your incident response. For this purpose, teams have already started integrating chatbots that can automate conversations, call an API, reset a server, and trigger processes both internally and externally.

The trick is to use the right ChatOps solution- one that is lean, easy to use, accurate and reliable. Your team’s ChatOps solution should link to your incident management platform for better, faster, optimized incident resolution.

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