Living In The Future With ChatOps

A quick summary of PagerDuty's chatops journey, starting in 2013 and going to the present day. Video available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Heo5YtRikds

Transcript

1. Living in the Future with ChatOps Eric Sigler, Developer Tools, PagerDuty
2. • lita-dig • lita-whois • lita-wtf • lita-jira • lita-datadog • lita-pagerduty • lita-statuspage • lita-kegbot • lita-deploygate
3. What now? • Getting Started • Two years in, what have we learned? • UI Techniques
4. The Short, Short Version • The original GitHub talk was nerd catnip for our Operations Engineers • Suddenly everything could be solved in chatops. • Took a structured approach to it, because early on we realized a few key elements.
5. Bacteria have culture • It’s going to be part of the culture, so: • Needs to be trusted, but allow for ”happy accidents” • Interactivity is key for flow • Stay in context • Don't predetermine what is "safe"
6. And theeeeen…..? • Find something that can be automated • Automate it • Play the long game of learning-by- demonstration • Repeat!
7. Of course they did. • First production deployment by an engineer? • “It’s like living in the future”
8. <Cut To: Two Years Later> • Cow paths are wonderful places to mine for chatops functionality • Think outside the bot • Engineers are evil
9. “I’m an operations engineer, not a designer!” • Immediate feedback is required (even if you don't take action), or the user will go insane • Users will explore the input parameters... • Convention > Configuration • Don't break the user's trust! • watch / stalk • # comments
10. Bonus OSS round?
11. Fin eric@pagerduty.com