get started with chatops

Get Started with ChatOps with “7 Steps to ChatOps for Enterprise Teams”

The right tools enable your team to ship amazing code quickly. But between building, deploying, testing, monitoring, and maintaining software, all those great tools can create a lot of stuff to keep track of. Luckily, there’s a solution to this problem: ChatOps.

ChatOps is a collective approach to running DevOps workflows and building a collaborative team culture. ChatOps can help your team stay focused and collaborate better by bringing all their tools, files, and conversations together in one place. If that sounds too good to be true, never fear – great ChatOps practices don’t happen overnight, but your team can tackle ChatOps one step at a time. 

Start with creating a central information hub in chat 💬 

It might not seem like it, but one of the biggest challenges to implementing ChatOps is getting everyone in your organization collaborating in the same place. The good news is that for teams that are already used to relying on a messaging platform to work together, the jump to making chat a centralized collaboration hub is more of a hop than a leap. 

The first step to getting started with ChatOps is getting your team to think of your messaging platform as their single source of truth – and not just for conversations! Your messaging platform can become your go-to spot for shared files, runbooks for repeated processes, project management, and more. 

Ramp it up with automation to take repetitive work off your hands 🎛

Integrating other tools into your workflow into your chat platform helps keep essential information at your team’s fingertips, reducing the need to switch between different tools throughout the day. Many teams start by automating fairly simple tasks – returning data from monitoring systems, creating issue tickets, or kicking off a Zoom call. 

As your ChatOps practice grows, you’ll find more and more opportunities to automate more complex tasks and workflows, such as enabling self-provisioning for common data queries or automating repeated steps as part of your incident response playbooks

Scale ChatOps with bots that keep everything moving smoothly robot 🤖

Somewhere along the journey to automate processes, you’ll likely realize that the people on your team could use a helping hand. Bots create a more user-friendly interface for using automation and help bring ChatOps to a broader group of users

But bots don’t just put a friendly face on ChatOps – they also take on some of the workload from your developers when time is essential, or when there are too many messages coming in to take in manually. Sophisticated ChatOps practices have bots interfacing with other bots, kicking off processes, and surfacing essential information to developers to help them separate signal from the noise. 

Ready to get started with ChatOps for your team? Check out 7 Steps to ChatOps for Enterprise Teams

Our new and improved guide to ChatOps breaks down implementing a ChatOps practice into seven stages of maturity, whether you’re just getting started or looking for ways to improve your ChatOps practice. We’ll share tips and tricks for building toward ChatOps best practices, and case studies from real teams that are using ChatOps to improve day-to-day operations. 

Read 7 Steps to ChatOps for Enterprise Teams here to kick off your ChatOps journey. 

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Ashley Dotterweich is the Head of Content at Mattermost. Previously, she ran content marketing for Heavybit Industries and Rainforest QA.