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I’m happy to announce that, beginning at the moment, you should use AWS Chatbot to troubleshoot and function your AWS sources from Microsoft Teams.
Communicating and collaborating on IT operation duties by chat channels is named ChatOps. It means that you can centralize the administration of infrastructure and purposes, in addition to to automate and streamline your workflows. It helps to supply a extra interactive and collaborative expertise, as you’ll be able to talk and work along with your colleagues in actual time by a well-known chat interface to get the job executed.
We launched AWS Chatbot in 2020 with Amazon Chime and Slack integrations. Since then, the panorama of chat platforms has developed quickly, and plenty of of you at the moment are utilizing Microsoft Teams.
AWS Chatbot Benefits
When utilizing AWS Chatbot for Microsoft Teams or different chat platforms, you obtain notifications from AWS companies straight in your chat channels, and you may take motion in your infrastructure by typing instructions with out having to change to a different software.
Typically you need to obtain alerts about your system well being, your funds, any new safety risk or danger, or the standing of your CI/CD pipelines. Sending a message to the chat channel is so simple as sending a message on an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) matter. Thanks to the native integration between Amazon CloudWatch alarms and SNS, alarms are mechanically delivered to your chat channels with no extra configuration step required. Similarly, because of the combination between Amazon EventBridge and SNS, any system or service that emits occasions to EventBridge can ship info to your chat channels.
But ChatOps is greater than the flexibility to identify issues as they come up. AWS Chatbot means that you can obtain predefined CloudWatch dashboards interactively and retrieve Logs Insights logs to troubleshoot points straight from the chat thread. You can even straight sort within the chat channel most AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) instructions to retrieve extra telemetry knowledge or useful resource info or to run runbooks to remediate the problems.
Typing and remembering lengthy instructions is troublesome. With AWS Chatbot, you’ll be able to outline your personal aliases to reference often used instructions and their parameters. It reduces the variety of steps to finish a activity. Aliases are versatile and may comprise a number of customized parameters injected on the time of the question.
And as a result of chat channels are designed for dialog, you can too ask questions in pure language and have AWS Chatbot reply you with related extracts from the AWS documentation or help articles. Natural language understanding additionally means that you can make queries akin to “show me my ec2 instances in eu-west-3.”
Let’s Configure the Integration Between AWS Chatbot and Microsoft Teams
Getting began is a two-step course of. First, I configure my crew in Microsoft Teams. As a Teams administrator, I add the AWS Chatbot software to the crew, and I pay attention to the URL of the channel I need to use for receiving notifications and working AWS sources from Microsoft Teams channels.
Second, I register Microsoft Teams channels in AWS Chatbot. I additionally assign IAM permissions on what channel members can do on this channel and affiliate SNS matters to obtain notifications. I could configure AWS Chatbot with the AWS Management Console, an AWS CloudFormation template, or the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK). For this demo, I select to make use of the console.
I open the Management Console and navigate to the AWS Chatbot part. On the highest proper aspect of the display screen, within the Configure a chat shopper field, I choose Microsoft Teams after which Configure shopper.
I enter the Microsoft Teams channel URL I famous within the Teams app.
At this stage, Chatbot redirects my browser to Microsoft Teams for authentication. If I’m already authenticated, I can be redirected again to the AWS console instantly. Otherwise, I enter my Microsoft Teams credentials and one-time password and wait to be redirected.
At this stage, my Microsoft Teams crew is registered with AWS Chatbot and able to add Microsoft Teams channels. I choose Configure new channel.
There are 4 sections to enter the main points of the configuration. In the primary part, I enter a Configuration identify for my channel. Optionally, I additionally outline the Logging particulars. In the second part, I paste—once more—the Microsoft Teams Channel URL.
In the third part, I configure the Permissions. I can select between the identical set of permissions for all Microsoft Teams customers in my crew, or I can set User-level roles permission to allow user-specific permissions within the channel. In this demo, I choose Channel position, and I assign an IAM position to the channel. The position defines the permissions shared by all customers within the channel. For instance, I can assign a job that permits customers to entry configuration knowledge from Amazon EC2 however not from Amazon S3. Under Channel position, I choose Use an present IAM position. Under Existing position, I choose a job I created for my 2019 re:Invent discuss ChatOps: chatbot-demo. This position provides read-only entry to all AWS companies, however I might additionally assign different roles that will enable Chatbot customers to take actions on their AWS sources.
To mitigate the danger that one other particular person in your crew by accident grants greater than the mandatory privileges to the channel or user-level roles, you may additionally embody Channel guardrail insurance policies. These are the utmost permissions your customers might need when utilizing the channel. At runtime, the precise permissions are the intersection of the channel or user-level insurance policies and the guardrail insurance policies. Guardrail insurance policies act like a boundary that channel customers won’t ever escape. The idea is much like permission boundaries for IAM entities or service management insurance policies (SCP) for AWS Organizations. In this instance, I connect the LearnOnlyAccess managed coverage.
The fourth and final part means that you can specify the SNS matter that would be the supply for notifications despatched to your crew’s channel. Your purposes or AWS companies, akin to CloudWatch alarms, can ship messages to this matter, and AWS Chatbot will relay all messages to the configured Microsoft Teams channel. Thanks to the combination between Amazon EventBridge and SNS, any software in a position to ship a message to EventBridge is ready to ship a message to Microsoft Teams.
For this demo, I choose an present SNS matter: alarmme within the us-east-1 Region. You can configure a number of SNS matters to obtain alarms from numerous Regions. I then choose Configure.
Let’s Test the Integration
That’s it. Now I’m prepared to check my setup.
On the AWS Chatbot configuration web page, I first choose the Send check message. I even have an alarm outlined when my estimated billing goes over $500. On the CloudWatch part of the Management Console, I configure the alarm to publish a message on the SNS matter shared with Microsoft Teams.
Within seconds, I obtain the check message and the alarm message on the Microsoft Teams channel.
Then I sort a command to know the place the billing alarm comes from. I need to perceive what number of EC2 cases are working.
On the chat shopper channel, I sort @aws to pick Chatbot because the vacation spot, then the remainder of the CLI command, as I might do in a terminal: ec2 describe-instances --region us-east-1 --filters "Name=structure,Values=arm64_mac" --query "Reservations[].Instances[].InstanceId"
Chatbot solutions inside seconds.
I can create aliases for instructions I often use. Aliases could have placeholder parameters that I can provide at runtime, such because the Region identify for instance.
I create an alias to get the record of my macOS occasion IDs with the command: aws alias create mac ec2 describe-instances --region $area --filters "Name=structure,Values=arm64_mac" --query "Reservations[].Instances[].InstanceId"
Now, I can sort @aws alias run mac us-east-1 as a shortcut to get the identical outcome as above. I can even handle my aliases with the @aws alias record, @aws alias get, and @aws alias delete instructions.
I don’t find out about you, however for me it’s onerous to recollect instructions. When I take advantage of the terminal, I depend on auto-complete to remind me of varied instructions and their choices. AWS Chatbot affords related command completion and guides me to gather lacking parameters.
When utilizing AWS Chatbot, I can even ask questions utilizing pure English language. It will help to search out solutions from the AWS docs and from help articles by typing questions akin to @aws how can I tag my EC2 cases? or @aws how do I configure Lambda concurrency setting?
It can even discover sources in my account when AWS Resource Explorer is activated. For instance, I requested the bot: @aws what are the tags for my ec2 sources? and @aws what Regions do I've Lambda service?
And I obtained these responses.
Thanks to AWS Chatbot, I spotted that I had a rogue Lambda perform left in ca-central-1. I used the AWS console to delete it.
Available Now
You can begin to use AWS Chatbot with Microsoft Teams at the moment. AWS Chatbot for Microsoft Teams is obtainable to obtain from Microsoft Teams app at no extra value. AWS Chatbot is obtainable in all public AWS Regions, at no extra cost. You pay for the underlying sources that you simply use. You may incur expenses out of your chat shopper.
Get began at the moment and configure your first integration with Microsoft Teams.