Last year, my colleague Ilya Bezdelev wrote Introducing AWS Chatbot: ChatOps for AWS to launch the public beta of AWS Chatbot. He also participated in the re:Invent 2019 Launchpad and did an in-depth AWS Chatbot demo:

In his initial post, Ilya showed you how you can practice ChatOps within Amazon Chime or Slack, receiving AWS notifications and executing commands in an environment that is intrinsically collaborative. In a later post, Running AWS commands from Slack using AWS Chatbot, Ilya showed how to configure AWS Chatbot in a Slack channel, display CloudWatch alarms, describe AWS resources, invoke a Lambda function and retrieve the logs, and create an AWS Support case. My colleagues Erin Carlson and Matt Cowsert wrote about AWS Budgets Integration with Chatbot and walked through the process of setting up AWS Budget alerts and arranging for notifications from within AWS Chatbot. Finally, Anushri Anwekar showed how to Receive AWS Developer Tools Notifications over Slack using AWS Chatbot.

As you can see from the posts that I referred to above, AWS Chatbot is a unique and powerful communication tool that has the potential to change the way that you monitor and maintain your cloud environments.

Now Generally Available

I am happy to announce that AWS Chatbot has graduated from beta to general availability, and that you can use it to practice ChatOps across multiple AWS regions. We are launching with support for Amazon CloudWatch, the AWS Code* services, AWS Health, AWS Budgets, Amazon GuardDuty, and AWS CloudFormation.

You can connect it to your Amazon Chime chatrooms and your Slack channels in minutes. Simply open the AWS Chatbot Console, choose your Chat client, and click Configure client to get started:

As part of the configuration process you will have the opportunity to choose an existing IAM role or to create a new one from one or more templates. The role provides AWS Chatbot with access to CloudWatch metrics, and the power to run commands, invoke Lambda functions, respond to notification actions, and generate support cases:

AWS Chatbot listens on Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) topics to learn about events and alarm notifications in each region of interest:

You can set up CloudWatch Alarms in any region where you select a topic and use them to send notifications to AWS Chatbot.

Special Offer from Slack

Our friends at Slack have put together a special offer to help you and your team connect and stay productive through new and shifting circumstances:

If you upgrade from the Free Plan to a Standard or Plus Plan you will receive a 25% discount for the first 12 months from your upgrade date.

Available Now

You can start using AWS Chatbot today at no additional charge. You pay for the underlying services (CloudWatch, SNS, and so forth) as if you were using them without AWS Chatbot, and you also pay any charges associated with the use of your chat client.

— Jeff;