ChatOps: A trojan horse to sneak DevOps ideas into other parts of your organization

The Operations team at PagerDuty realized earlier this year we were becoming a bottleneck for other teams within the company. So we decided to provide common Ops services through our internal company chat bot - code deployments, database schema modifications, spinning up additional servers, etc. Our engineering teams immediately began taking advantage of this - but unexpectedly, non-engineering teams such as Finance and Sales also began using the services as well. Now, groups throughout the company are adding services and unblocking other teams, to be faster and more productive.

In this talk we’ll go over what our current ChatOps tools are, how different teams have taken to using them in various ways (some expected, some less so), show what some of the pitfalls are when a bot does more than just show pictures of cats & manatees, and how you can incrementally try these ideas out in your own organisation.

Eric Sigler is an Operations Engineer at PagerDuty, and enjoys making sure their infrastructure is ready to wake people up at 3AM. Before his current role, Eric led technical operations teams at Minted and Missouri University of Science & Technology. He currently lives in San Francisco along with his wife, and enjoys discovering new places to see in California whenever he isn’t on call.