A Five Minute Overview of AWS ChatBot

One of the challenges faced by every organization is being promptly notified and responding to alerts to prevent customer-impacting distractions. AWS ChatBot brings notifications to your Slack and Amazon Chime webhooks, so your DevOps and SRE teams are aware of potential issues.

As of October 12, 2019, AWS ChatBot is in beta mode, meaning not every feature planned for the service may be available or working correctly. This article examines what AWS ChatBot is, how to set it up and how it looks in your Slack channels. This article will not cover how to set up channels in Slack or rooms in Amazon Chime.

What is AWS ChatBot?

Many development, production, DevOps and SRE teams communicate using some form of instant messaging application, such as Cisco Jabber, Google Hangouts, Slack, Amazon Chime and more. The advantage of having issues being reported in your instant messaging application is that potential issues can be seen by a wider audience and be immediately investigated and remediated.

AWS ChatBot currently supports notifications from:

• AWS Budgets (through SNS Topics);
• AWS CloudFormation (through stack options); and,
• Amazon CloudWatch.

Additionally, AWS ChatBot also supports Amazon CloudWatch Events from the following services:

• AWS Health;
• AWS Security Hub;
• Amazon GuardDuty;
• Amazon EventBridge;
• AWS Config; and,
• AWS Systems Manager.

There is no support at this time for other AWS Services which may be sending notifications through Simple Notification Service unless they trigger a CloudWatch metric. The exact method of configuring these services to send notifications to AWS ChatBot varies between the services. Additionally, the service configuration will need additional permissions to send the notification to AWS CHatBot.

Setting up AWS ChatBot

For this part of the discussion, I am assuming you already have at least one Slack channel defined, and you have the appropriate authorization to configure the Slack channel.

If you are not already in the AWS Console, login and select AWS ChatBot from the services list.