Amazon Web Services Inc. said today that its AWS Chatbot service for sending notifications to DevOps teams is now generally available.

Launched in beta in June 2019, AWS Chatbot enables security, billing and system stability alerts to be sent to DevOps teams via the popular collaboration tool Slack. The service delivers alerts from several important AWS services, including Amazon Cloud Watch, AWS Health, AWS Budgets, AWS Security Hub, Amazon GuardDuty and AWS CloudFormation.

It takes its cue from the Amazon Simple Notification Service, which sends the same types of notifications to developers’ email inboxes. The messages can also be routed through Amazon’s own Chime collaboration service, the company said.

“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,” AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr said in a blog post. He said the tool should help teams that are usually engaged with Slack to respond to incidents faster.

AWS Chatbot works by redirecting customers’ SNS topic notifications to developers’ Slack channels or Chime chat rooms. Administrators can add the alerts to Slack from directly within the AWS Chatbot console, though some extra configuration might be required for some services, Amazon said.

The types of notifications it delivers include messages about billing and cost management, operating metrics for Amazon services, security threats, compliance alerts and availability of resources for key applications.

“DevOps teams can receive real-time notifications that help them monitor their systems from within Slack,” the Slack team wrote in a blog post. “That means they can address situations before they become full-blown issues, whether it’s a budget deviation, a system overload or a security event.”

“The future of work is to meet people where they work, and that is in dialogue-based applications like Microsoft Teams or Slack,” said Holger Mueller, an analyst with Constellation Research Inc. “So it’s no surprise that AWS Chatbot has a plugin for Slack, giving developers and DevOps teams better access to a wide range of AWS notifications.”

AWS Chatbot is available now at no cost, with users instead billed for the underlying AWS services they use.

Image: AWS