Manage AWS resources in your Slack channels with AWS Chatbot AWS Cloud Operations Blog

With AWS Chatbot, you can use chat rooms to monitor and respond to events in your AWS Cloud. AWS Chatbot integrates with Slack using an AWS Chatbot Slack app that you can install to your Slack workspace from the AWS Chatbot console. The installation is performed with a click-through OAuth 2.0 flow in a browser and takes a few clicks.

You can run both read-only and mutative CLI commands in your Microsoft Teams and Slack channels. Refer to the AWS Chatbot documentation for the limitations compared to the AWS CLI. If you don’t remember the command syntax, AWS Chatbot will help you complete the command by providing command cues and asking for additional command parameters as needed. 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.

• Running AWS commands from Slack using AWS Chatbot expands the toolkit your team uses to respond to operational events and interact with AWS.
• This allows you to use a mobile device to run commands without running into issues with the mobile device automatically converting a double hyphen to a long dash.
• You can create a private channel with just yourself and AWS Chatbot and use it for direct message communication.
• When prompted for the reserved-concurrent-executions parameter, type @aws 10 as the input value.

You create a Microsoft Teams channel configuration in AWS Chatbot console and authorize AWS Chatbot to send notifications to the configured channel and process AWS commands in the chat channel. The installation is performed with a click-through flow in a browser or using AWS CloudFormation templates and takes a few minutes to set up. This lets DevOps teams use chat channels as the primary means of collaboration when monitoring events, analyzing incidents, and operating AWS workloads. DevOps teams widely use chat rooms as communications hubs where team members interact—both with one another and with the systems that they operate. Bots 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 chat rooms where the entire team can see the notifications and discuss next steps.

If you find you are unable to run commands, you may need to switch your user role or contact your administrator to find out what actions are permissible. 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. You can quickly access logs for Lambda invocations using the new AWS Chatbot action buttons on CloudWatch Alarm notifications in Slack.

Add more parameters for the initial command with @aws function-name

name. AWS Chatbot parses your commands and helps you complete the

correct syntax so it can run the complete AWS CLI command. 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 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 parameters. For example, to provide a subject type @aws subject SUBJECT STRING.

In the near term, there won’t be any visual changes to the end-user experience. Long term, the move will allow us to add new features, such as mobile video, so users can continue to rely on Slack for secure enterprise communication. In practice, that means users no longer have to download and upload data between systems, which slows things down and introduces errors.

For the up-to-date list of supported services, see the AWS Chatbot documentation. Currently we have set up AWS Chatbot integration for Slack to receive notifications about CodePipeline – results of CodeBuilds and status of all stages of CodePipeline. I have noticed that the out of the box integration’s messages aren’t as descriptive as I would like. For any AWS Chatbot role that creates AWS Support cases, you need to attach the AWS Support command permissions policy to the role. For existing roles, you will

need to attach the policy in the IAM console.

AWS Chatbot announces support for management of AWS resources from Slack (General Availability)

To get started with AWS Chatbot, go to the AWS Chatbot console, create a configuration for Microsoft Teams, Slack, or Chime, and add AWS Chatbot to your channels or chatrooms. 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. Moreover, you can run AWS CLI commands to retrieve details of all of the CloudWatch alarms in your account. You want to receive a notification every time the function invocation fails so that you can diagnose and fix problems as they occur.

AWS Chatbot currently supports service endpoints, however 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.

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. Then, AWS Chatbot will guide you with all of the required parameters. 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. 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. You can either select a public channel from the dropdown list or paste the URL or ID of a private channel.

Getting started with AWS Chatbot

Make sure that the Slack channel isn’t archived or deleted

Archived or deleted Slack channels can’t receive messages. All the apps in archived or deleted Slack channels are deactivated. 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.

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. 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. AWS Chatbot configurations use IAM roles that the service assumes when making API calls and running commands on behalf of AWS Chatbot users.

You can set AWS Chatbot permissions scope with either a shared channel IAM role or an individual user IAM role. With a shared channel role, all channel members use a shared IAM role to run commands. Alternatively, you can configure AWS Chatbot to require channel members to choose an IAM role to run commands.

As you can see from the posts that I referred to above, AWS Chatbot is a unique and powerful communication tool that has the potential to change the way that you monitor and maintain your cloud environments. When you pass the logical ID of this resource to the intrinsic Ref function, Ref returns the ARN of the configuration created. The ARNs of the SNS topics that deliver notifications to AWS Chatbot. AWS Chatbot will show the first 30 log entries starting from the beginning of the alarm evaluation period. 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. If you would like to add AWS Chatbot access to an existing user or group, you can choose from allowed Chatbot actions in IAM.

This increases visibility for your team and facilitates quicker responses. DevOps teams can receive real-time notifications that help them monitor their systems from within Slack. 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 Support Command Permissions policy applies only to the

AWS Support service. You

can define your own policy with greater restrictions, using this policy as a template. He started this blog in 2004 and has been writing posts just about non-stop ever since. To get the ID, open Slack, right click on the channel name in the left pane, then choose Copy Link.

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.

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. 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. You can customize messages for your application events or customize default AWS service notifications in AWS Chatbot using custom notifications. By customizing notification content, you can promptly receive important application updates with relevant contextual information in your chat channels.

To change the default account in the channel, enter @aws set default-account

and select the account from the list. To perform actions in your chat channels, you must first have the appropriate permissions. For more information about AWS Chatbot’s permissions, see Understanding permissions.

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 aws chatbot slack permissions. The IAM policies will be consistent across

chat channels that support commands in your AWS Chatbot service. AWS Chatbot integrates with Microsoft Teams using an AWS Chatbot for Microsoft Teams app that you can install in your Microsoft Teams.

You can select multiple SNS topics from more than one public Region, granting them all the ability to notify the same Slack channel. Find the URL of your private Slack channel by opening the context (right-click) menu on the channel name in the left sidebar in Slack, and choosing Copy link. AWS Chatbot can only work in a private channel if you invite the AWS bot to the channel by typing /invite @aws in Slack. Even though below approach is correct, but notification’s originating service is not supported by AWS Chatbot. For a full list of services that are supported by AWS Chatbot, see Monitoring AWS services using AWS Chatbot. Run AWS Command Line Interface commands from Microsoft Teams and Slack channels to remediate your security findings.

In order to successfully test the configuration from the console, your role must also have permission to use the AWS KMS key. 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. If you do not have an AWS account, complete the following steps to create one. 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. Click the title of the notification to navigate to the AWS Management Console page for the notification source. For example, if you click on the title of an AWS Budgets notification, you will be taken to the details page for that specific budget, where you can review and analyze your budget performance.

Thousands of teams around the world rely on AWS Chatbot to improve the application development process. In the future, the tool will incorporate AWS’s more than 175 services, giving developers the ability to manage all of their cloud-based services in Slack. You can create a private channel with just yourself and AWS Chatbot and use it for direct message communication.

Since launching EKM, we’ve added new features to give users even more visibility into and oversight of their information in Slack. Those include EKM for Workflow Builder, a visual tool that allows users to create custom workflows in Slack. EKM customers using Workflow Builder can expect full encryption of a workflow, including its steps, messages, forms, active channels, and data sent or collected. With this new EKM offering, users can continue to automate routine processes while meeting security requirements. If you work on a DevOps team, you already know that monitoring systems and responding to events require major context switching.

You can use AWS Chatbot to change the AWS Lambda function’s maximum simultaneous execution capacity limit. Revcontent is a content discovery platform that helps advertisers drive highly engaged audiences through technology and partnerships with some of the world’s largest media brands. You can use Cloudwatch EventBridge messages and adjust them to your likening.

You can also access the AWS Chatbot app from the Slack app directory.

The permissions scope is further controlled by channel guardrail IAM policies. AWS Chatbot supports both read-only and mutative CLI commands for most AWS services. Additionally, you can specify guardrail policy permissions to define allowable commands in your channel. To type a command, mention AWS Chatbot in a message by typing “@aws .” AWS Chatbot will provide command cues if you use incorrect syntax and will prompt you for additional command parameters as required. You can also run AWS CLI commands directly in chat channels using AWS Chatbot.

You can configure AWS Chatbot for multiple AWS accounts in the same chat channel. When you work

with AWS Chatbot for the first time in that channel, it will ask you which account you want to use. You can set up CloudWatch Alarms in any region where you select a topic and use them to send notifications to AWS Chatbot. 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.

Whether you’re analyzing trends in customer engagement or assessing internal help-desk requests, you can pass the information quickly and securely between Slack and AWS systems. Slack and AWS share a commitment to enhancing workforce collaboration. Slack will continue to leverage AWS as its preferred cloud provider, and AWS will adopt Slack organization-wide to streamline team communication. With this latest round of updates, we’re bridging the gaps between our services to make the end-user experience even more seamless. Finally, under SNS topics, select the SNS topic that you created in Step 1.

You can retrieve diagnostic information, configure AWS resources, and run workflows. To run a command, AWS Chatbot checks that all required parameters are entered. If any are missing, AWS Chatbot prompts you for the required information.

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. AWS Chatbot will execute the automation runbook and provide notification updates in the channel as the automation runbook progresses. By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge you have read our privacy policy. Selecting a different region will change the language and content of slack.com. All this happens securely from within the Slack channels you already use every day.

You can configure as many channels with as many topics as you need. The log shows a command that a user can copy, paste, and edit to re-run the query for

viewing logs. You can specify parameters with either a double https://chat.openai.com/ hyphen (–option) or a single hyphen (-option). This allows you to use a mobile device to run commands without running into issues with the mobile device automatically converting a double hyphen to a long dash.

For Send a notification to…, choose the SNS topic that you created in Step 1. To receive notifications when the alarm enters the OK state, choose Add notification, OK, and repeat the process. Use EventBridge Input Transformers to generate custom notifications, and then forward the notifications to an SNS topic. Use AWS Chatbot to monitor the SNS topic and deliver notifications to the configured Microsoft Teams or Slack channels.

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. When you finish providing required parameters, AWS Chatbot will ask you to confirm creation of the case. Choose Show error logs to filter results to only log entries containing “error”, “exception”, or “fail”. 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. To follow along with this example, you need an AWS account, as well as a Slack channel to configure with AWS Chatbot.

AWS Chatbot is an interactive agent that makes it easier to monitor and interact with your AWS resources in your Microsoft Teams and Slack channels. You can run commands using AWS CLI syntax directly in chat channels. AWS Chatbot enables you to retrieve diagnostic information, configure AWS resources, and run workflows. In November 2021, we announced the preview of this feature update to the AWS Chatbot.

The ARN of the IAM role that defines the permissions for AWS Chatbot. Note that file attachments are not currently supported in AWS Chatbot. Once the function invocation completes, AWS Chatbot will show the output of the Invoke call. AWS Chatbot is available free of charge and you only pay for the AWS resources you use, such as CloudWatch Log Insights that is used for querying logs. He has keen interests in providing simple and safe user experiences for AWS customers and expanding the capabilities of ChatOps via AWS Chatbot.

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. In the top-right corner, select the Slack workspace to configure and choose Agree. Your Slack workspace installs the AWS Slack App, and the AWS account that you logged in with can now send notifications.

The AWS Chatbot custom notifications must follow the Event schema format. 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.

AWS Chatbot helps your entire team stay updated on, respond to, and resolve operational events, security findings, and budget alerts for applications running in your AWS environment. AWS Chatbot supports commands for most AWS services, and its permissions scope is defined by the IAM role and channel IAM policy guardrails defined in your AWS Chatbot configurations. Regardless of the IAM role permissions, access to certain services and commands, such as IAM and AWS Key Management Service (KMS), is disabled to prevent exposing credentials in chat channels. To run a command in a Microsoft Teams or a Slack channel, first create a channel configuration using the AWS Chatbot console. To start interacting with AWS Chatbot in Microsoft Teams or Slack, type “@aws” followed by a command using the standard AWS CLI syntax. For example, type “@aws cloudwatch describe-alarms” to get a list and a chart of CloudWatch Alarms.

If you have existing chat channels using the AWS Chatbot, you can reconfigure them in a few steps

to support the AWS CLI. For example, if you enter @aws lambda get-function with no further arguments,

the Chatbot requests the function name. Then, run the @aws lambda list-functions

command, find the function name you need, and re-run the first command with the corrected option.

Finally, if you also want to receive notifications, such as CloudWatch Alarms or AWS Budgets, select SNS topics that those notifications are published to. In the top-right corner, select the Slack workspace to configure and choose Allow. 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. 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.

The list of IAM policy ARNs that are applied as channel guardrails. The AWS managed ‘AdministratorAccess’ policy is applied as a default if this is not set. To trigger a workflow or a runbook from Slack, you can invoke a Lambda function by running @aws lambda invoke FUNCTION_NAME. 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. To install the AWS Chatbot app on your Slack workspace, follow the instructions in set up chat clients for AWS Chatbot.

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. DevOps teams widely use Slack channels Chat GPT 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.

Gain near real-time visibility into anomalous spend with AWS Cost Anomaly Detection alert notifications in Microsoft Teams and Slack by using AWS Chatbot. Follow the prompts from AWS Chatbot to fill out the support case with its needed parameters. When

you complete the case information entry, AWS Chatbot asks for confirmation. You can enter a complete AWS CLI command with all the parameters, or you can enter the command

without parameters and AWS Chatbot prompts you for missing parameters.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. 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. 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. 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, and using guardrail policies.

This log includes executed commands and their chat workspace ID, channel ID, and channel user ID attributes. The audit log events in CloudWatch Logs are always enabled and can’t be disabled. Message actions are shortcuts that let you take quick action by clicking a button on notifications and messages sent by AWS Chatbot. For example, CloudWatch Alarm notifications for Lambda functions and API Gateway stages have “Show Logs” and “Show Error Logs” buttons that display the logs for the affected resource in the chat channel.

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. 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.