ChatOps – Collaborate and Resolve – in a Single-Pane-of-Glass

Chris Sunter Senior Technical Consultant at Interlink Software on the benefits of a collaboration platform that brings together people, tools and workflows, to help resolve outages in a transparent and standardised manner.

Is this you too?

In my experience dealing with service outages differ from organisation to organisation. Often there isn’t any accepted, standardized workflow. Support teams and indeed individuals might favour different recovery sequences. A lot of the associated knowledge is locked away in people’s heads.

People might have to log in to multiple tools to restore a service. Steps taken to resolve an issue can get lost along the way, with no centralised means of recording them.

IT Operations staff might be dispersed across different sites and geographies making efficient communications a difficult prospect.

I could go on …

Overall the above factors make for a lot of pressure, stress and potential chaos in getting a service back online.

ChatOps – a Single-Pane-of-Glass Collaboration Area

ChatOps is all about giving service owners and IT operations people access to everything they need to resolve a problem – all in one place – in a single-pane-of-glass.

It all starts with the creation of a Service Outage Room (SOR). On detecting an issue a SOR is generated; either by a human, or automatically – powered by machine learning.

Service owners, the relevant IT ops people receive a notification and are invited into the SOR to get working on resolving the issue.

Everyone takes a break from time to time – no problem – they can access the SOR on their smartphone or tablet when they’re away from their desks.

There’s an outage – let’s chat about it

So, everyone’s gathered together. The ChatOps window becomes a live time-stream a chat session where all the communications, workflows and steps involved in resolving an issue take place. A virtual war room if you like.

Facilitated by its resident ChatBot, members of the SOR can run commands and scripts, access tools like Microsoft Orchestrator without leaving the chat session and having to log in to a plethora of different systems.

The results of commands are continuously fed back to the window; timestamped and visible to all involved.

Machine learning runs in the background, automatically logging and interpreting what’s happening. Over time machine learning will automatically identify if similar issues have occurred in the past, offering up the resolution workflows that have previously worked best.

People in the SOR can then choose to run that same recovery sequence; dramatically reducing the time it takes to restore a service.

ChatOps is an opportunity to resolve incidents with greater speed, efficiency and consistency. Get in touch to learn more HERE

About Chris

Chris has 12 years’ experience in the IT industry fulfilling a number of different roles including Software Developer, Business Analyst and Software Consultant. He’s spent the majority of his career within professional services teams and has extensive experience of the full project lifecycle within large enterprises.