Modern IT environments require lots of communication either to other people in the same department or teams or even cross-company communication. Especially the first part where team members need information on upcoming changes, deployments done and issues fixed, we as System Administrators or Engineers, Infrastructure Engineers or DevOps team members always have to do things multiple times: First we use a tool to identify the actual state, then we use another tool to identify and run tasks and last but least we communicate findings, results or fixes. Everything we do when using the tools is something we do alone by ourselves. Other team members might learn by shouting in the room that we work on something. Remote staff might even be unaware. This talk will give an introduction to ChatOps - a combination of using tools and communication in parallel. We try to find possible use cases, identify requirements for ChatOps and learn about existing solutions. The talk will finish with a ChatOps live demo using Icinga2 and Jenkins.

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Collaborative
Communication
Martin Alfke
<ma@example42.com>

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about me
started as SysAdmin
Slackware on 15 floppy disks
Puppet since 2007
Puppet Certified Professional, Instructor and
Consultant
Infrastructure Engineer
CEO & Co-Founder example42 GmbH

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– James Fryman @jfryman
“Bringing the work you are already doing ...
!
... into the conversations you are already
having”

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Communication
!
!
!
!
“... you cannot not communicate…” Paul Watzlawick -
1967

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Communication
!
!
!
!
“... you cannot not communicate… but you can
not communicate accurately.” Paul Watzlawick - 1967

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Communication
!
!
!
!
Communication is transmission of information from a
source to a receiver without loss of information

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Communication
But: one can talk all day without saying anything.

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Communication

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Ancient Times
Pictures
Alphabet
Carved in stones
Invention of paper

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Modern Times
Phone
SMS
EMail

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More Modern
IRC
XMPP/Jabber
Twitter
Slack
...

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Collaboration
Split work load
Different expertise levels
Support and train less experienced team members
Share learning experiences

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Collaboration
Pair Programming
4-eyes principle
DevOps / OpsDev
NetOps / OpsNet
DevNet / NetDev

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Communication in IT
System stati
Monitoring
Build Chain
Tickets
Communication
Email
XMPP

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Communication in IT
need for Monitor wall
need for large screens
how to do that for remote work (home office)?

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Combining Communication
!
!
!
!
Dashboards (maybe rolling)
multiple sources of information

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Communication Overlay
Why switching tools?
Why specifying content or information in multiple
locations
How to ensure everybody knows the same?
What have been the tasks that were done solving the
problem? (Documentation - Wiki?)

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Aligning Communication
API-fied applications
Jira
Jenkins
Icinga2
Puppet
...

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Aligning Communication
API requirements
Authentication
Authorization
Error Handling
Feedback
...

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Aligning Communication
!
!
Do everything in one place
Automate everything
“Protect yourself from yourself and make your code
super-secure” (J. Fryman, DevOpsDays Berlin 2014)

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Aligning Communication
GNU approach
one tool does one thing only
second things are done with a new tool

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Communication Simplyfied
One tool to combine everything
!
!
!
!

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Communication Simplyfied
One tool to combine everything
Monitoring status, acknowledgement, downtime
CfgMgmt run
Generate reports and graphs
Trigger CI
...

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Communication - Old
John: Hi Ben, do you see the spike in load on backend systems?
Ben: Hi John, wait, I have a look....
Ben: Yes, looks weird. I will analyse.
John: Hi Ben, forget it. It was Bob running a report.
John: Ben?
Ben: Hi John, I restarted the server. But now we have an issue
with customer sessions.
Ben: Uuh. Bad.

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Communication - New
Bob: <bot> generate_report year 2013-2015
<bot>: generate_report: generating report for Bob
<bot>: icinga2: PROBLEM high load on backend: avg 28.5
John: Hi Bob, please do not run this report during peak hours.
Bob: Oh. Sorry.
John: <bot> icinga2 ack -s backend
<bot>: icinga2: acknowledged problems on backend
<bot>: generate_report: Bob: your report is ready: http://<url>
<bot>: icinga2: SOLVED high load on backend

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Communication Helper
Hubot - NodeJS
Lita - Ruby
Err - Python

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ChatOps Tools
Generic helper with multiple backends (collaboration
endpoints) and helpers (work scripts)

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Demo
Lita
XMPP - Prosody
CI - Jenkins
Monitoring - Icinga2

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Discussion
Flexibility vs. Security
Needs coding and adoption to infrastructure

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Links
Hubot: https://hubot.github.com/
Lita: https://www.lita.io/
Err: http://errbot.io/

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More Links
http://www.slideshare.net/jhand2/chat-ops-a-beginners-
guide?next_slideshow=1
http://www.slideshare.net/EvanPowell/some-chat-ops-what
http://code.oursky.com/human-and-cat-friendly-chatops/
https://zachholman.com/talk/move-fast-break-nothing/
http://www.slideshare.net/VictorOps/real-world-chatops
http://devops.com/2014/07/16/chatops-communicating-
speed-devops/

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Collaborative
Communication
Martin Alfke
example42 GmbH
!
we are .... not ... yet ...
hiring ...
!
but building a Puppet Expert
Network

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Collaborative
Communication
Martin Alfke
example42 GmbH
!
Q&A