AWS Chatbot

• Hugh O'Neal
• September 19, 2022

AWS Chatbot is an interactive agent that simplifies controlling, managing and troubleshooting AWS workloads in chat channels. With AWS Chatbot, you may receive alerts, run commands to get diagnostic information, set up AWS resources, and initiate workflows. With several clicks, you can receive AWS notifications and execute AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) commands from chat channels securely and efficiently. AWS Chatbot manages the integration and security permissions between AWS services and your Slack channels or Amazon Chime chats.

Advantages of using AWS Сhatbot

AWS Chatbot lets your team stay informed, collaborate, and quickly respond to incidents, security breaches, and other alerts for applications working in your AWS environment. The list of other benefits of AWS bots:

• Real-time Notification: AWS Chatbot sends pre-selected event-triggered alerts to your Slack channels or Amazon Chime chats, informing your team of operational incidents or other events that interest them most.
• Instant response: AWS Chatbot lets you issue commands from your Slack channels, simplifies collaboration, and helps your team quickly respond to events, manage workloads, and resolve issues without switching to other AWS management tools.
• Quick setup: it takes five minutes to set up AWS Chatbot from the AWS Chatbot console in your Slack channels or Amazon Chime chats.
• Easily define permissions: with AWS Chatbot, you can rapidly set permissions for individual Slack channels and Amazon Chime chats. Account-level settings, predefined permission templates, and security policies make it easy to tailor to your company’s security and compliance needs.

With this chatbot, your team can run commands to set up AWS resources, resolve incidents securely, and complete tasks from Slack channels without context switching to other AWS management tools.

How does AWS Chatbot work?

AWS Chatbot allows you to use ChatOps for AWS. ChatOps accelerates software development and operations by enabling DevOps teams to use chat clients and chatbots to communicate and complete tasks. AWS Chatbot notifies chat users of events in their AWS services, so teams can collaborate to monitor and resolve issues in real-time instead of accessing emails from their SNS threads. Essential functions of such chatbot:

• Supports Slack and Amazon Chime. You can add an AWS chatbot to your Slack channel or Amazon Chime chat rooms with a few clicks.
• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) predefined policy templates – AWS Chatbot provides chat room permission controls utilizing AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). The predefined AWS Chatbot templates make it easy to select and configure the permissions you want to associate with a given channel or chat room.
• Receive Notifications: Use the AWS Chatbot to receive notifications of operational incidents and other events from supported sources such as active alerts, security alerts, or budget deviations. To set up information in the AWS Chatbot console, select the channels or chat rooms you want to receive notifications for. Then, identify which Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topics you want to trigger alarms.
• Monitor and manage AWS resources via AWS CLI using Slack: AWS Chatbot supports CLI commands for most AWS services, making it easy to control and manage AWS resources from Slack on desktop and mobile devices. Your teams can get real-time diagnostic information, modify their AWS resources, run AWS SM runbooks, and run long-running jobs from a master location.

The AWS Chatbot uses Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) themes to create and send event and alarm notifications from AWS services to Slack and Amazon Chime chats. Slack and Amazon Chime users map SNS topics to their Slack channels or Amazon Chime webhooks. For Slack, after a Slack administrator approves AWS Chatbot support for a Slack workspace, any workspace user can add AWS Chatbot to their Slack channels. To successfully use AWS Chatbot, you need:

• An AWS account to connect with Amazon Chime or Slack chat clients when setting up AWS chatbot.
• Admin rights for your Slack workspace or Amazon Chime chat.
• Acquaintance with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and IAM roles and policies.
• Experience with AWS services supported by AWS Chatbot, including expertise with configuring these services to subscribe to Amazon Simple Notification Service topics to send notifications.

AWS Chatbot works with various AWS services, including Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Security Center, and Amazon GuardDuty. The complete list you can find in AWS Chatbot documentation. These services that work with AWS Chatbot use Amazon SNS topics as targets for sending events and alert notifications. You may have already installed Amazon SNS themes that send email notifications to DevOps and developer staff. Because AWS Chatbot forwards notices of these Amazon SNS topics to chats, you can map these Amazon SNS topics to Slack channel or Amazon Chime webhook in AWS Chatbot console. AWS Chatbot extends the communication tools your team typically uses to coordinate and communicate. In this article, we told you about what AWS chatbot is, why it is beneficial to use it, how to get started, and also examined the basic principles of its operation.