Tutorial: Using AWS Chatbot to run an AWS Lambda function remotely AWS Chatbot

In the top-right corner, select the Slack workspace to configure and choose Allow. Your Slack workspace installs the AWS Slack App, and the AWS account that you logged in with is now authorized to communicate with your Slack workspace. Moreover, you can run AWS CLI commands to retrieve details of all of the CloudWatch alarms in your account. If you have an existing AWS administrator user, you can access the AWS Chatbot console with no additional permissions. AWS recommends that you grant only the permissions required to perform a task for other users. For more information, see Apply least-privilege permissions in the AWS Identity and Access Management User Guide.

The start incident workflow uses multi-region to guarantee if for some reason our main AWS region services are down the incident can be used from a fallback different region. AWS Chatbot will show the first 30 log entries starting from the beginning of the alarm evaluation period. You can https://chat.openai.com/ quickly access logs for Lambda invocations using the new AWS Chatbot action buttons on CloudWatch Alarm notifications in Slack. Finally, if you also want to receive notifications, such as CloudWatch Alarms or AWS Budgets, select SNS topics that those notifications are published to.

AWS Chatbot will execute the automation runbook and provide notification updates in the channel as the automation runbook progresses. If you would like to add AWS Chatbot access to an existing user or group, you can choose from allowed Chatbot actions in IAM. CloudForecast’s focused daily AWS cost monitoring reports to help busy engineering teams understand their AWS costs, rapidly respond to any overspends, and promote opportunities to save costs. Available in the Slack App Directory, CloudForecast’s Slack Integration simplifies managing AWS cost monitoring for your engineering teams. Directly through our app, leverage filters like AWS Tags, sub-accounts, and AWS Cost Categories to socialize AWS costs they own effectively among teams and catch potential AWS costs surprises early. Integrating chatbot directly with Slack ensures that all members have immediate access to important alerts and can execute necessary commands without leaving their communication platform.

This blog post will take you through the journey of developing our incident management tool, highlighting the challenges we faced, the solutions we implemented, and the key lessons we learned along the way. In the world of technology, ensuring seamless functionality for our customers is a constant challenge. As with any technology since the invention of the wheel, things don’t always go as planned. What sets us apart is our proactive approach to handling these inevitable hiccups.

Manage, track, and report your AWS spending in seconds — not hours

Enterprise Grid includes Slack’s most robust security features, like data encryption, SAML-based single sign-on and granular app management. You only pay for the underlying services that you use, in the same manner as if you were using them without AWS Chatbot. Make sure to delete any resources that you do not plan to use in the future to avoid incurring costs. To receive a notification when a Lambda function fails to execute, create a CloudWatch alarm, select AWS Lambda namespace, Errors as metric name and select the Lambda function to watch. We would like to receive notifications on Slack channel when the CPU utilization of EC2 instances reaches the threshold of 70%.

By leveraging serverless architecture and optimising our resources, we ensure that our solutions are not only effective but also sustainable and cost-effective. In order to guarantee that incidents are resolved promptly we send a reminder message every hour if there are no new communications on the incident Slack channel. Start incident Workflow prompt where the user is required to fill the data.

This lets DevOps teams use chat channels as the primary means of collaboration when monitoring events, analyzing incidents, and operating AWS workloads. With this feature, customers can manage AWS resources directly from their Slack channels. Customers can securely run AWS CLI commands to scale EC2 instances, run AWS Systems Manager runbooks, and change AWS Lambda concurrency limits. Customers can now monitor, operate, and troubleshoot AWS workloads from Slack channels without switching context between Slack and other AWS Management Tools.

Add more parameters for the initial command with @aws function-name

name. AWS Chatbot parses your commands and helps you complete the

correct syntax so it can run the complete AWS CLI command. You can run commands using AWS CLI syntax directly in chat channels. AWS Chatbot enables you to retrieve diagnostic information, configure AWS resources, and run workflows.

This tool works in a symbiotic collaboration with our self made Slack Bot, this bot listens to events and is able to trigger responses on our cloud platform as well as making api calls to some of our services. Today, we introduced a new feature that enables DevOps teams to run AWS commands and actions from Slack. You can retrieve diagnostic information, invoke AWS Lambda functions, and create support cases right from your Slack channels, so your team can collaborate and respond to events faster. AWS Chatbot supports commands using the already familiar AWS Command Line Interface syntax that you can use from Slack on desktop or mobile devices. Today, we are announcing the public preview of a new feature that allows you to use AWS Chatbot to manage AWS resources and remediate issues in AWS workloads by running AWS CLI commands from Slack channels.

You can specify parameters with either a double hyphen (–option) or a single hyphen (-option). This allows you to use a mobile device to run commands without running into issues with the mobile device automatically converting a double hyphen to a long dash. Slack Connect allows OpenAI to move conversations with customers out of over-stuffed inboxes and into interactive channels.

To get this ID, open Slack, right click on the channel name in the left pane, then choose Copy Link. When someone tries to disable AWS CloudTrail logging, such events get captured as findings on GuradDuty console. You receive following notification on Slack channel when the specific Lambda fails to execute. To look up timeout and memory size parameters for a Lambda function. Additionally once a workflow is started a small input box appears to fill in the above described data.

Resources

Previously, you could only monitor AWS resources and retrieve diagnostic information using AWS Chatbot. To top it all off, thanks to an intuitive setup wizard, AWS Chatbot only takes a few minutes to configure in your workspace. You simply go to the AWS console, authorize with Slack and add the Chatbot to your channel. (You can read step-by-step instructions on the AWS DevOps Blog here.) And that means your teams are well on their way to better communication and faster incident resolutions.

• If you don’t have one already, you can sign up today and start building with free credit.
• Another part of what makes the OpenAI team feel confident using Slack to power their work is Slack’s security features.
• If you find you are unable to run commands, you may need to switch your user role or contact your administrator to find out what actions are permissible.
• The AWS managed ‘AdministratorAccess’ policy is applied as a default if this is not set.
• Slack AI is offered as a paid add-on to Pro, Business+ and Enterprise plans.

In order to successfully test the configuration from the console, your role must also have permission to use the AWS KMS key. After you sign up for an AWS account, secure your AWS account root user, enable AWS IAM Identity Center, and create an administrative user so that you

don’t use the root user for everyday tasks. If you do not have an AWS account, complete the following steps to create one. Get started with AWS Chatbot by visiting the AWS Management Chatbot Console and by downloading the AWS Chatbot app from the Microsoft Teams marketplace or Slack App Directory.

AWSome ways to use AWS Chatbot

You can read more about the wide range of AWS services supported in AWS ChatOps Documentation. With the capability to integrate with multiple chat platforms, it offers a streamlined approach to managing these changes directly through familiar communication tools. This blog will explore how you can tap into AWS Slack Integration with AWS Chatbot to enhance decision-making capabilities, significantly cutting down on delays and resource wastage. Gain near real-time visibility into anomalous spend with AWS Cost Anomaly Detection alert notifications in Microsoft Teams and Slack by using AWS Chatbot. You can configure as many channels with as many topics as you need. To get the ID, open Slack, right click on the channel name in the left pane, then choose Copy Link.

When prompted for the reserved-concurrent-executions parameter, type @aws 10 as the input value. The following example shows the sample interaction and the command output on the execution of the AWS CLI command. In this post, I will show you AWS Chatbot configuration steps and share sample DevOps use cases to configure your AWS resources using AWS CLI commands from Slack channels. To change the default account in the channel, enter @aws set default-account

and select the account from the list.

AWS Chatbot doesn’t currently support service endpoints and there are no adjustable quotas. For more information about AWS Chatbot AWS Region availability and quotas,

see AWS Chatbot endpoints and quotas. AWS Chatbot supports using all supported AWS services in the

Regions where they are available.

They’re the creators behind the wildly popular ChatGPT, a versatile AI chatbot that can, amongst many things, compose content and answer questions in a conversational manner. “Slack is central to how our company collaborates, for increasing velocity, and is integral to building with our customers. Below is a list of documents for the technologies demonstrated above and used on our Incident Management Tool.

If you work on a DevOps team, you already know that monitoring systems and responding to events require major context switching. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. In the course of a day—or a single notification—teams might need to cycle among Slack, email, text messages, chat rooms, phone calls, video conversations and the AWS console. Synthesizing the data from all those different sources isn’t just hard work; it’s inefficient. To create an AWS Support case from Slack, enter @aws support create-case and follow the AWS Chatbot prompts to provide it with all the required parameters.

Find answers faster and make customers happier, all from one place. Solve incidents using solutions from across your org, all without ever leaving Slack. Choose Show error logs to filter results to only log entries containing “error”, “exception”, or “fail”. You can use AWS Chatbot to look up information about your resources. If you don’t have one already, you can sign up today and start building with free credit. Once you have an account, you can find your API Key and API Secret at the top of the Vonage API Dashboard.

Learn more about AWS Chatbot

Feel free to tag me on X, formerly known as Twitter, and follow my team on there, too. In this tutorial, we will be combining it with the OpenAI API (ChatGPT) to create a voice chatbot. We will go over how to deploy and customize the bot on Vonage Cloud Runtime which eliminates the need to manage servers and hosting on your own. The Vonage Voice API is a tool for developers to integrate voice-calling capabilities into their applications. With the Vonage Voice API, developers can create applications, such as call screening systems, virtual assistants, conference calling platforms, and customer support hotlines. You can send your comments to the AWS Chatbot team by typing @aws feedback  in your Slack channel.

Notice that all steps are non blocking, if one step fails during API Call to the service the remaining resources can still be created. We understand that in the world of tech, even with the best intentions and robust systems, things can occasionally go wrong. Our commitment is to ensure that when issues arise, they are resolved swiftly and with minimal impact on our customers. Everything runs on Slack’s secure infrastructure, meeting the same compliance standards as Slack itself. Get essential customer context and sell smarter by summarizing account channels.

In this post, I walked you through some of the use cases where AWS Chatbot helped reduce the time to recovery while also increasing transparency within DevOps teams. In November 2021, we announced the preview of this feature update to the AWS Chatbot. In addition to the preview feature set, we are introducing improvements that allow customers to specify multiple guardrail policies in a chat configuration, giving more control in securing channel permissions. Then, AWS Chatbot will guide you with all of the required parameters.

AWS Chatbot will understand your input, map it to matching AWS CLI commands, and ask for a confirmation. Implementing Slack AWS integrations within your team channels allows you to maximize cloud-saving opportunities and implement infrastructure changes instantly. Real-time integration solutions are essential for DevOps teams to have easy access to the Chat GPT data to instantly make informed decisions. 81% of developers believe adopting new tools is critical to an organization’s success. As engineering and IT departments onboard new technology, they need automation to optimize these efforts. When something does require your attention, Slack plus AWS Chatbot helps you move work forward more efficiently.

What is AWS Chatbot?

The company has over 170 Slack Connect channels and has sent over five million messages since becoming a Slack customer in 2018. The AWS managed AdministratorAccess policy is applied by default if this is not set. After configuring the alarm, as soon as your EC2 instances’ CPU usage crosses the threshold, you receive the following notification on your Slack channel. Our aws chatbot slack customer obsession at Aircall drives us to continually add value for our clients. By improving our internal processes and tools, we ensure that we can deliver the best possible experience to our customers, even when challenges arise. Our commitment to sustainability means that we are not only focused on immediate solutions but also on long-term impacts and efficiencies.

Ilya Bezdelev is the Principal Product Manager for AWS User Experience, where he focuses on conversational interfaces. He cares about making DevOps teams more effective and helping them minimize the mean time to recovery using collaborative ChatOps on AWS. Note that file attachments are not currently supported in AWS Chatbot. Once the function invocation completes, AWS Chatbot will show the output of the Invoke call.

The ARN of the IAM role that defines the permissions for AWS Chatbot. Follow the prompts from AWS Chatbot to fill out the support case with its needed parameters. When

you complete the case information entry, AWS Chatbot asks for confirmation. You can enter a complete AWS CLI command with all the parameters, or you can enter the command

without parameters and AWS Chatbot prompts you for missing parameters.

“We at OpenAI use Slack every day, and it is critical to how we get work done here,” says Brad Lightcap, the chief operating officer of OpenAI. Throughout this influx of customers and growth to their business, OpenAI has relied on Slack for their collaboration needs. OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company that’s revolutionizing how the world perceives artificial intelligence.

A message appears after the workflow is submitted asking for additional confirmation, everyone is already able to see at this point that something is going on. Below we will deep dive into the technical implementation, the challenges we faced, a cost analysis, and the lessons that we learned. Additionally we will provide some sneak peek at future tool improvements and plans.

Recognizing the need for change, we evaluated various industry options to find a solution that met our requirements and customer-centric approach while being cost-effective. After thorough discussions, we chose to develop a custom in-house solution. This solution leverages AWS Systems Manager (SSM) for incident management, our proprietary Slack Bot (Airbot), and our extensive knowledge of serverless computing within the cloud. Realizing the need for a more efficient system, we explored various industry solutions. Our goal was to find an approach that adhered to our requirements, maintained our customer-centric focus, and was cost-effective.

We used AWS Management Console to do necessary configurations for each use case. You can automate these solutions based on your specific requirements using AWS CloudFormation or AWS CLI or SDK. Therefore, our priority was to keep it as simple as possible and to provide comprehensive training through live demonstrations, detailed documentation, and interactive learning modules. It was gratifying to see how quickly both technical and non-technical personnel adapted to using the tool. Our journey began with a straightforward yet manual incident management process. This involved numerous custom actions and a pre-defined response plan.

We focus on improving our methods to manage uncertainty, minimize client impact, and learn from every incident. To get started, first configure Slack notifications for CloudWatch Alarms for a Lambda function via AWS Chatbot. Then, make your function fail to trigger the CloudWatch Alarm to go into the alarm state.

Emojis allow team members to say things without starting a new thread. Emojis can indicate that messages have been read, that work on a project is in progress or simply encourage coworkers for a job well done. Collaborating within channels empowers OpenAI to find faster, more accurate solutions for customer needs.

You can use AWS Chatbot to change the AWS Lambda function’s maximum simultaneous execution capacity limit. AWS Chatbot will run the AWS CLI command and show the output of the AWS CLI command. CloudForecast makes the tedious work of AWS cost monitoring less tedious. Read more about how Bonsai’s engineering team uses the Slack report to prevent end of the month AWS costs surprises. You can also access the AWS Chatbot app from the Slack app directory. All this happens securely from within the Slack channels you already use every day.

You can configure AWS Chatbot for multiple AWS accounts in the same chat channel. When you work

with AWS Chatbot for the first time in that channel, it will ask you which account you want to use. CloudWatch alarm notifications show buttons in chat client notifications to view logs related to the

alarm.

We gather essential metrics from each incident, maintain a culture of blameless accountability, and disseminate lessons learned transparently among all stakeholders. You can either select a public channel from the dropdown list or paste the URL or ID of a private channel. You’ve successfully created a Voice ChatGPT Bot using the Vonage Voice API and the OpenAI API on Vonage Cloud Runtime! Our developer community is growing on Slack, and we’d love for you to be a part of it. If you end up trying this tutorial out, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

When you have an operational event or want to check in on your application’s health, you can use AWS Chatbot to show details about CloudWatch Alarms in your account. For private Slack channels, find the URL of the channel by opening the context (right-click) menu on the channel name in the left sidebar in Slack, and choosing Copy link. Cloud Runtime Once the workspace is open, you’ll see that the sample app has already been deployed and is ready to go! Call the Vonage phone number, ask a question, and you should receive an answer. Create IstanceYou’ll be directed to a new page where you are prompted to select a language. After signing into your Vonage developer account, go to the Voice ChatGPT Bot (Java) CodeHub page.

In the figure below is an example of the custom Slack bot response to the incident start action. Slack AI is offered as a paid add-on to Pro, Business+ and Enterprise plans. Users are not able to purchase it themselves — instead, a Slack admin can purchase it on behalf of your team. For pricing information or to learn more, please reach out to your Slack account executive, or talk to sales. Slack AI currently supports English, Spanish, and Japanese with support for additional languages coming later. Catch up in one click, and take some time to focus on the work that matters most.

After careful consideration, we decided to build a custom in-house solution. This solution leverages AWS Systems Manager (SSM) for incident management, integrates our home-grown Slack Bot (Airbot), and taps into our extensive expertise in serverless computing within the cloud. Running AWS commands from Slack using AWS Chatbot expands the toolkit your team uses to respond to operational events and interact with AWS.

The response plan was entirely manual, and during incidents, steps were often skipped. Communication occurred across multiple channels, diverging from the centralized approach outlined in the response plan. This led to prolonged incident response times and delays in communication between engineers, support teams, and clients. To create an AWS Support case from Slack, type @aws support create-case and follow the AWS Chatbot prompts to provide it with all the required parameters. For example, to provide a subject type @aws subject SUBJECT STRING. AWS Chatbot will also provide an option to refine the AWS CLI command results by prompting you to rerun the AWS CLI command with optional parameters.

Additionally, you can configure channel permissions to match your security and compliance needs by modifying account-level settings, using predefined permission templates, and using guardrail policies. You can also run AWS CLI commands directly in chat channels using AWS Chatbot. You can retrieve diagnostic information, configure AWS resources, and run workflows. To run a command, AWS Chatbot checks that all required parameters are entered. If any are missing, AWS Chatbot prompts you for the required information. AWS Chatbot

then confirms if the command is permissible by checking the command against what is allowed by the configured IAM roles and the channel guardrail policies.

Chatbots help facilitate these interactions, delivering important notifications and relaying commands from users back to systems. Many teams even prefer that operational events and notifications come through Slack channels. This allows the entire team to see notifications and act on them through commands to chatbots.

Streamline your AWS cost monitoring efforts with CloudForecast – the easy-to-use AWS cost management tool for busy Engineering, SRE, DevOps, Infra, and Tech teams. Safely configure AWS resources, resolve incidents, and run tasks from Microsoft Teams and Slack without context switching to other AWS management tools. It’s even easier to set permissions for individual chat rooms and channels, determining who can take these actions through AWS Identity Access Management. AWS Chatbot comes loaded with pre-configured permissions templates, which of course can be customized to fit your organization. Another part of what makes the OpenAI team feel confident using Slack to power their work is Slack’s security features. OpenAI uses Slack’s Enterprise Grid for its message retention and admin control capabilities.

For example, to provide a subject enter @aws subject SUBJECT STRING. Airbot Slack response to an incident start action, notice the URL to join the newly created slack channel and the message for company wide visibility. The following sections describe the automation document steps that are used for our custom made incident management process and finally, how we integrate the tool for ease of usage within our own Slack bot. We now have a custom-made solution emphasizing simplicity, fast incident resolution, and a strong foundation of learned lessons from each incident. Our tool allows anyone to report an incident with visibility for all engineering, management, and customer support teams. It shifts the effort from managing the incident to resolving it and addressing follow-up items.

Not only does this speed up our development time, but it improves the overall development experience for the team.” — Kentaro Suzuki, Solution Architect – LIFULL Co., Ltd. In Slack, this powerful integration is designed to streamline ChatOps, making it easier for teams to manage just about every operational activity, whether it’s monitoring, system management or CI/CD workflows. The list of IAM policy ARNs that are applied as channel guardrails. The AWS managed ‘AdministratorAccess’ policy is applied as a default if this is not set. If you find you are unable to run commands, you may need to switch your user role or contact your administrator to find out what actions are permissible.

This is just a glimpse of the many features we have envision for the incident management tool. After confirming the incident has started and resources are created, we can consider the incident resolved once the client-level impact is mitigated. A user then needs to initiate the “Resolve Incident” workflow, which informs us of the resolution and automatically gathers incident metrics. To trigger a workflow or a runbook from Slack, you can invoke a Lambda function by running @aws lambda invoke FUNCTION_NAME.