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I’m happy to announce that, beginning immediately, you should utilize AWS Chatbot to troubleshoot and function your AWS assets from Microsoft Groups.
Speaking and collaborating on IT operation duties via chat channels is named ChatOps. It permits you to centralize the administration of infrastructure and purposes, in addition to to automate and streamline your workflows. It helps to supply a extra interactive and collaborative expertise, as you may talk and work along with your colleagues in actual time via a well-recognized chat interface to get the job completed.
We launched AWS Chatbot in 2020 with Amazon Chime and Slack integrations. Since then, the panorama of chat platforms has advanced quickly, and lots of of you at the moment are utilizing Microsoft Groups.
AWS Chatbot Advantages
When utilizing AWS Chatbot for Microsoft Groups or different chat platforms, you obtain notifications from AWS providers immediately in your chat channels, and you may take motion in your infrastructure by typing instructions with out having to change to a different software.
Sometimes you need to obtain alerts about your system well being, your price range, any new safety menace or danger, or the standing of your CI/CD pipelines. Sending a message to the chat channel is so simple as sending a message on an Amazon Easy Notification Service (Amazon SNS) matter. Because of the native integration between Amazon CloudWatch alarms and SNS, alarms are robotically delivered to your chat channels with no further configuration step required. Equally, due to the combination between Amazon EventBridge and SNS, any system or service that emits occasions to EventBridge can ship info to your chat channels.
However ChatOps is greater than the flexibility to identify issues as they come up. AWS Chatbot permits you to obtain predefined CloudWatch dashboards interactively and retrieve Logs Insights logs to troubleshoot points immediately from the chat thread. You too can immediately sort within the chat channel most AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) instructions to retrieve further telemetry information or useful resource info or to run runbooks to remediate the problems.
Typing and remembering lengthy instructions is tough. With AWS Chatbot, you may outline your personal aliases to reference continuously used instructions and their parameters. It reduces the variety of steps to finish a activity. Aliases are versatile and might comprise a number of customized parameters injected on the time of the question.
And since chat channels are designed for dialog, you can too ask questions in pure language and have AWS Chatbot reply you with related extracts from the AWS documentation or help articles. Pure language understanding additionally permits you to make queries resembling “present me my ec2 situations in eu-west-3.”
Let’s Configure the Integration Between AWS Chatbot and Microsoft Groups
Getting began is a two-step course of. First, I configure my workforce in Microsoft Groups. As a Groups administrator, I add the AWS Chatbot utility to the workforce, and I be aware of the URL of the channel I need to use for receiving notifications and working AWS assets from Microsoft Groups channels.
Second, I register Microsoft Groups channels in AWS Chatbot. I additionally assign IAM permissions on what channel members can do on this channel and affiliate SNS subjects to obtain notifications. I’ll configure AWS Chatbot with the AWS Administration Console, an AWS CloudFormation template, or the AWS Cloud Growth Package (AWS CDK). For this demo, I select to make use of the console.
I open the Administration Console and navigate to the AWS Chatbot part. On the highest proper facet of the display, within the Configure a chat shopper field, I choose Microsoft Groups after which Configure shopper.
I enter the Microsoft Groups channel URL I famous within the Groups app.
At this stage, Chatbot redirects my browser to Microsoft Groups for authentication. If I’m already authenticated, I will likely be redirected again to the AWS console instantly. In any other case, I enter my Microsoft Groups credentials and one-time password and wait to be redirected.
At this stage, my Microsoft Groups workforce is registered with AWS Chatbot and able to add Microsoft Groups channels. I choose Configure new channel.
There are 4 sections to enter the small print of the configuration. Within the first part, I enter a Configuration identify for my channel. Optionally, I additionally outline the Logging particulars. Within the second part, I paste—once more—the Microsoft Groups Channel URL.
Within the third part, I configure the Permissions. I can select between the identical set of permissions for all Microsoft Groups customers in my workforce, or I can set Consumer-level roles permission to allow user-specific permissions within the channel. On this demo, I choose Channel function, and I assign an IAM function to the channel. The function defines the permissions shared by all customers within the channel. For instance, I can assign a task that enables customers to entry configuration information from Amazon EC2 however not from Amazon S3. Below Channel function, I choose Use an current IAM function. Below Present function, I choose a task I created for my 2019 re:Invent talk about ChatOps: chatbot-demo. This function offers read-only entry to all AWS providers, however I may additionally assign different roles that will permit Chatbot customers to take actions on their AWS assets.
To mitigate the chance that one other particular person in your workforce unintentionally grants greater than the mandatory privileges to the channel or user-level roles, you may additionally embody Channel guardrail insurance policies. These are the utmost permissions your customers may need when utilizing the channel. At runtime, the precise permissions are the intersection of the channel or user-level insurance policies and the guardrail insurance policies. Guardrail insurance policies act like a boundary that channel customers won’t ever escape. The idea is just like permission boundaries for IAM entities or service management insurance policies (SCP) for AWS Organizations. On this instance, I connect the ReadOnlyAccess managed coverage.
The fourth and final part permits you to specify the SNS matter that would be the supply for notifications despatched to your workforce’s channel. Your purposes or AWS providers, resembling CloudWatch alarms, can ship messages to this matter, and AWS Chatbot will relay all messages to the configured Microsoft Groups channel. Because of the combination between Amazon EventBridge and SNS, any utility in a position to ship a message to EventBridge is ready to ship a message to Microsoft Groups.
For this demo, I choose an current SNS matter: alarmme within the us-east-1 Area. You’ll be able to configure a number of SNS subjects to obtain alarms from varied Areas. I then choose Configure.
Let’s Take a look at the Integration
That’s it. Now I’m prepared to check my setup.
On the AWS Chatbot configuration web page, I first choose the Ship take a look at message. I even have an alarm outlined when my estimated billing goes over $500. On the CloudWatch part of the Administration Console, I configure the alarm to submit a message on the SNS matter shared with Microsoft Groups.
Inside seconds, I obtain the take a look at message and the alarm message on the Microsoft Groups channel.
Then I sort a command to know the place the billing alarm comes from. I need to perceive what number of EC2 situations are working.
On the chat shopper channel, I sort @aws to pick out Chatbot because the vacation spot, then the remainder of the CLI command, as I’d do in a terminal: ec2 describe-instances --region us-east-1 --filters "Title=structure,Values=arm64_mac" --query "Reservations[].Situations[].InstanceId"
Chatbot solutions inside seconds.
I can create aliases for instructions I continuously use. Aliases could have placeholder parameters that I may give at runtime, such because the Area identify for instance.
I create an alias to get the checklist of my macOS occasion IDs with the command: aws alias create mac ec2 describe-instances --region $area --filters "Title=structure,Values=arm64_mac" --query "Reservations[].Situations[].InstanceId"
Now, I can sort @aws alias run mac us-east-1 as a shortcut to get the identical end result as above. I may also handle my aliases with the @aws alias checklist, @aws alias get, and @aws alias delete instructions.
I don’t find out about you, however for me it’s onerous to recollect instructions. Once I use the terminal, I depend on auto-complete to remind me of assorted instructions and their choices. AWS Chatbot affords related command completion and guides me to gather lacking parameters.
When utilizing AWS Chatbot, I may also ask questions utilizing pure English language. It might probably assist to search out solutions from the AWS docs and from help articles by typing questions resembling @aws how can I tag my EC2 situations? or @aws how do I configure Lambda concurrency setting?
It might probably additionally discover assets in my account when AWS Useful resource Explorer is activated. For instance, I requested the bot: @aws what are the tags for my ec2 assets? and @aws what Areas do I've Lambda service?
And I acquired these responses.
Because of AWS Chatbot, I spotted that I had a rogue Lambda operate left in ca-central-1. I used the AWS console to delete it.
Obtainable Now
You can begin to make use of AWS Chatbot with Microsoft Groups immediately. AWS Chatbot for Microsoft Teams is available to download from Microsoft Teams app at no further price. AWS Chatbot is out there in all public AWS Areas, at no further cost. You pay for the underlying assets that you simply use. You may incur fees out of your chat shopper.
Get began immediately and configure your first integration with Microsoft Groups.
