Smooth operations are easy to plan but difficult to implement, but not when DevOps uses chatbots

DevOps is the combination of development (Dev) and operations (Ops) aimed at uniting people, processes, and technology. It is essentially leveraged for application planning, development, delivery, and operations by enabling a smooth collaboration among otherwise siloed operations like development, IT operations, quality engineering, and security. DevOps culture helps teams to enhance overall productivity and achieve overall business goals faster. The word DevOps resonates with automation, teamwork, and tools, and hence chatbots can play a central role in achieving a culture of automation. Here are the top 10 ways DevOps uses Chatbots.

Collection of performance statistics

Chatbots can be put to use for collecting performance statistics. It can help in automatically creating a detailed report for all the projects and the team members.

Problematic Situations Prediction

Chatbots can predict situations that give a window of opportunity for team leaders to fix problems even before they arise. Monitoring the data of user activity also becomes easy, giving decision-makers a chance to choose the most suitable time for new releases.

Security

Chatbots can be customized for limited access hence reducing the risk of unauthorized logins and sending commands to the central monitoring applications instantly.

Timely Reporting

After receiving a task, the bot will right away jump into performing the task and report about it. On completion of the task, the bot will share the details of the task.  In case the task is not completed, it will give the reason for failure.

Retrieval of Logs

Log retrieval is one of the important uses of chatbots in DevOps. It helps the support teams in knowing the reason for the failure of a task. The conventional methods usually involve the repetitive execution of commands. Chatbots can speed up the process of retrieving relevant log files without much effort.

 Test case execution

Chatbots can call automated test cases for checking the status of the activity. They can test them multiple times through multiple users in distinct environments. All that is required is hosting the bot in a machine with access to the cluster running environment.

Service Health Checkups

Use cases having a Hadoop cluster environment with multiple services operating on different machines require a health checkup. Traditional methods involve repetitive process of running commands on a terminal. Instead, if a chatbot is involved, you can receive health reports just by giving commands in human language.

Delivering smart alerts

Instead of receiving a horde of alerts only to struggle to find the right ones, chatbots can be employed to get smart alerts. Depending on the threshold level, velocity of alerts, chatbots can post alerts on relevant channel or person on Slack, suggesting them to take action.

App Management:

Different apps having an HTTP/REST API can be put under the scrutiny of a chatbot. Apart from monitoring they can also start and stop them if and when required.

Workflow Management:

Workflows such as incident management, escalations and deploying code can be initiated and managed by chatbots through Slack.