Introducing Mattermost ChatOps: Open source, real-time DevOps

It’s never been a more exciting time for DevOps. The range of community-driven, open source tools available for building, deploying, and running apps brings new sophistication and scalability—once the exclusive domain of internet giants—into the hands of virtually all organizations. This wave of innovation brings with it a new challenge: How do companies integrate all these components into a single, coherent experience that give teams the ability to manage this new power (and complexity) in real-time?

Today we are announcing Mattermost ChatOps, a new suite of tools that makes bringing these systems together simple, prescriptive, and open.  At the core of this suite is the Mattermost Server, the open source messaging platform used by tens of thousands of people everyday for real-time collaboration. New today are a set of supporting tools that make the deployment and integration of Mattermost simple and open, providing a clear path for companies to create real-time DevOps workflows for their teams. 

Most importantly, Mattermost ChatOps is end-to-end open source—every component from the runtime environment, core server, and integrations—is available for developers to contribute and control.  As the rest of the DevOps ecosystem is firmly open source, providing an open path for ChatOps is essential for this way of working to become mainstream.

The specific components of Mattermost ChatOps include:

Mattermost Server, now deployable via Kubernetes Operator

As the first Kubernetes Operator for an application, our Operator enables you to install and manage Mattermost through simple commands that require only limited Kubernetes knowledge and significantly reduced IT overhead. This lets dev teams smoothly deploy Mattermost to high security private networks to connect with mission-critical systems. The Operator currently supports running Mattermost with high availability, rolling upgrades, blue/green upgrades, database backups/migrations, and scaling based on user seats. The Operator framework also allows Mattermost to add almost endless features and improvements to help customers. 

You can install the Mattermost Operator from operatorhub.io.

Integrations with DevOps tools

Mattermost ChatOps speeds up workflows and code reviews through DevOps tool integrations and accelerates rapid response with configurable alerting, notifications, and user interface plugins with platforms like GitHub and GitLab. You can get these plugins through their respective GitHub repos.

Jira: 

• Open Jira issues using a popup modal inside your chat window or using a slash command
• Attach a message from Mattermost to an existing issue
• Post Jira updates to Mattermost channels 
• Use slash commands to assign owners, transition, or close issues

See repo

Standup Raven: 

• At the specified standup time, an automated reminder appears 
• Team members enter their standup items into a pre-configured window
• Automatic standup report gets posted based on everyone’s update

See repo

GitLab: 

• Get a daily post letting you know what issues and merge requests require your attention
• Get a direct message when someone mentions you, requests your review, comments on or modifies one of your merge requests/issues, or assigns you on GitLab
• See how many reviews, unread messages, assignments, and open merge requests you have with buttons in the Mattermost sidebar
• Use the /gitlab slash command to subscribe a Mattermost channel to notifications on a repo, get to do items, or update your GitLab settings

See repo

GitHub: 

• Get a daily post letting you know what issues and pull requests need your attention
• Get a direct message in Mattermost when someone mentions you, requests your review, comments on or modifies one of your pull requests/issues, or assigns you on GitHub
• See how many reviews, unread messages, assignments, and open pull requests you have with buttons in the Mattermost sidebar
• Use the /github slash command to subscribe to a repo, get to do items, change GitHub settings, and more

See repo

Jenkins: 

• Connect and disconnect with Jenkins server
• Use the /jenkins slash command to create, abort, or trigger a build, enable, disable, or delete a job, or get artifacts, test results, or build logs

See repo

DevOps is as much about collaboration and process as tooling and automation. Dev teams also need a better way to collaborate effectively across the DevOps lifecycle—and that way is open source ChatOps. More than just inserting chat into all of your workflows, ChatOps done right brings conversations, tools, files, and automation into a single space.

Mattermost ChatOps allows you to surface relevant information to your team and enables you to take action directly where you’re having conversations. When an issue comes in, a ChatOps workflow can alert relevant team members, who all work together to make a fix directly within Mattermost. 

Mattermost is committed to enabling developers improve communication and efficiency through open source software. With the release of Mattermost ChatOps, we hope to provide developers with better tools for managing their real-time DevOps workflows.

Ready to get started with ChatOps? Read our guide: 7 Steps to ChatOps for Enterprise Teams.