ChatOps: Practices, Patterns, and Antipatterns

One way to think of ChatOps is as another type of user-interface to your current ops toolset. It can be similar to existing command line syntax, but to take full advantage of "conversation driven development" there are some important differences. PagerDuty recently went through the process of creating or extending dozens of services to be chat-driven, and learned many lessons about how humans prefer to work with their robot minions. (Examples include: accuracy vs responsiveness of a reply, when should a reply be public vs private, and avoiding "information overload" on long-running or noisy commands).

In this talk, we'll cover how plugins differ between several of the major chat frameworks, go over what tools are available to make plugin development easier, and go over UI patterns and conventions PagerDuty has standardized on when we add features to our 'bot.

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.