Overview

IBM Z® ChatOps integrates tools and processes into a chat platform and provides a collaboration model of working. It can help you with incident notification, problem isolation, information query, resource management from currently most popular chat tools and the provided chat window embedded in your web applications.

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 with following major features:

• Incident notification

  Z ChatOps provides one incident common data model and microservice. Any product can leverage them to forward their own alert, event, or incident to chat tool channels or the embedded chat window provided by Z ChatOps so as to alert the IT operating team about critical events and start collaboration. Z ChatOps also supports forwarding any event in Apache Kafka. Z ChatOps displays all incidents in a uniform style along with launch-in-context links and drill-down actions for operators to view more details with one click. For more information, see Common Incident Data Model.

• Z resource management from channel and embedded chat window
  Z ChatOps provides one chatbot. Operators and experts can communicate with the chatbot to manage resources in Z environment from chat tool channels or embedded chat window directly:

  • Query real-time system health and monitoring data that is provided by IBM Z System Automation, OMEGAMON® products, IBM Z NetView® and IBM Z Workload Scheduler.
  • Manage automation resource including start, stop, restart, suspend, resume, and reset resources. Manage the status of workload scheduler workstations, job streams and jobs.
  • Issue IBM Z System Automation, IBM Z NetView and MVS™ commands with login challenge dialog to ask for your authentication on Z, usually RACF® ID, to take actions.
  • Look up Z message IDs that begin with ING and HSA in IBM® Documentation.

  Context-sensitive clickable actions and links usually are provided together in almost all responses of the chatbot. You can click them to drill down and ask the chatbot for more related information.

  For more information, see Using IBM Z ChatOps.

• Out-of-box and customizable launch-in-context integrations
  Z ChatOps provides the following three ways for you to share data among different products.

  • Immediately previews the data of copy-as links from IBM Service Management Unite when they are pasted in channels.
  • Provides out-of-box launch-in-context links to almost all chat bot responses, and you can click the links to navigate to dashboards or web pages of products including IBM Service Management Unite, IBM Z Service Management Explorer, IBM z/OS® Workload Interaction Navigator, IBM Z Data Analytics Platform / Elastic Stack, IBM Z Data Analytics Platform / Splunk, and Dynamic Workload Console.
  • Helps you to add your own launch-in-context links to bot responses via configuration.

  For more information, see Configuring LIC links.
• Enable chatting and conversational UI driven capability for your web applications
  Z ChatOps provides one platform and framework agnostic chat window library. You can embed the chat window in any of your web applications to enable the following capabilities for your application:

  • All chatops capabilities provided by Z ChatOps
  • Host web page UI change driven by your chatting with the bot. You can also customize it via configuration.

  Two themes (dark, light) and automatically registering your current application user are also provided for the embedded chat window.

  For more information, see Integrating with embedded chat window.

• Support currently most popular chat tools
  Z ChatOps supports the following three currently most popular chat tools. You can choose to use any of them according to your IT environment.

  • Mattermost

    For more information, see Configuring the chat tool-Mattermost.

  • Slack

    For more information, see Configuring the chat tool-Slack.

  • Microsoft Teams

    For more information, see Configuring the chat tool-Microsoft Teams.

• Rich bot interaction methods
  Z ChatOps provides several different ways for you to interact with the bot. You can chat with the bot in any of the ways that you like.

  • Z ChatOps commands and inline help. For more information, see IBM Z ChatOps Commands.

    Command aliases for you to create your own aliases to the commands with placeholder for dynamic filtering to simplify your interaction. For more information, see IBM Z ChatOps Commands and Configuring aliases.

  • Simple Form Sentence. For more information, see IBM Z ChatOps Simple Formed Sentence (SFS).
  • Mouse navigation for drill-down. For more information, see Mouse navigation.
• Comprehensive security measures
  Z ChatOps provides all possible measures to ensure the product security including but not limit to the following:

  • Configurable allow list to control who can chat with the bot.
  • Authentication request to take actions.
  • Configurable cipher suites for you to remove any insecure or weak cipher suites on time..
  • Access and login rate limit for Z ChatOps microservice.
  • Securing of button and drop-down box actions with API key to ensure that they are created by Z ChatOps.
  • Automatic encryption of sensitive information including password, token, key, and so on.
  • Automatic mask of sensitive information including password, token, key, and so on, in logs.
  • Securing of all communications including HTTP and socket via SSL.

For more information about IBM Z ChatOps architecture and deployment, see Architecture of IBM Z ChatOps and System Deployment Proposal.