Overview

IBM Z® ChatOps integrates tools and processes into a chat platform and provides a collaboration model of working. It can help you with problem isolation, incident notification, information query, and can share information about Z system resources to your chat and collaboration platform.

What is ChatOps?

ChatOps stands for chat-based operations and describes a collaboration model that connects people, processes, tools, and automation in a seamless and transparent way through a chat platform and extensive use of specialized chatbots. ChatOps is designed to help improve service reliability, service recovery time, and collaboration efficiency.

For example, during the troubleshooting of an incident, instead of each person working independently and coordinating by phone, email, problem ticket, or collocating physically in an office, team members can collaborate by using a chat and collaboration platform, such as Microsoft Teams, Slack or Mattermost, that is designed for human to human and human to machine interactions. Such a collaboration platform maintains a timeline of team communication that provides a record and enables team members to stay current without becoming overwhelmed by information.

With ChatOps, all technical team members can work together in the same virtual location and see and share information by using a chat platform with which they are familiar or currently using with other projects. In this case, all necessary tools for the team are readily available at their hands. Team members can also access to those tools from within a chat window that uses bots or other integrations instead of opening dedicated application windows or consoles.

IBM Z ChatOps elevates collaboration techniques and processes

IBM Z ChatOps provides ChatOps capabilities for your IBM Z environment.

Z ChatOps enables three major features as listed below:

• Analysis and operation on Z environment: Operators and experts can communicate with the chatbot to query Z system health and monitoring data that is provided by Z System Automation, OMEGAMON®, Z NetView® and Z Workload Scheduler. The query result with clickable actions and context-sensitive hyperlinks is displayed directly in the chat tool. Users can click them to ask the chatbot for more related information, drill down into IBM® Service Management Unite (SMU) dashboards for more details or issue actions in context of the displayed information. Users can also operate target resources such as start and stop them, or issue Z System Automation, MVS™ and NetView commands in channels directly, with one login dialog pops up requesting users to input their own operation account and password, usually RACF® ID, to take the action. Users can select to save their password to avoid repeating to input the account and password. Users can also ask the chatbot to look up Z message ID in the IBM Documentation. Various ways of interacting with the chatbot are provided, for example, chatting with the chatbot with simple formed sentences as well as chatting with a full-featured command-line syntax, or by simply clicking action buttons.
• Integration with event management: Z events can be forwarded to Z ChatOps and Z ChatOps can display them in a channel in the chat tool. With the information displayed in the channel, the technical team can be alerted about critical Z events and start the collaboration in the chat platform. Event-alarming messages also provide links with drill-down capabilities to view more details.
• Data sharing: Z ChatOps supports launch-in-context links that are provided in IBM Service Management Unite. Users can copy those links with one click and paste the links into the channel of the chat platform to easily share the data from SMU dashboard. The Z ChatOps chatbot can automatically create point-in-time previews of the resources that are referenced in the links. Users can also click those links to launch the corresponding SMU dashboard in a web browser and navigate to the referenced resource.

With the described capabilities, Z ChatOps supports collaborative problem isolation for Z environments within popular chat platforms.