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Has anyone ever found a bot-generated message in Slack to be useful?

by pbreit 4y ago

zoover2020 4y ago
I'd say ChatOps is a very legitimate use case. But I see your underlying point of bots frontloaded with a lot of logic.
mod 4y ago
Sure. We used to have one that reported any error on any web app we had deployed. You could use other types of reporting, of course, but that worked for us. Any important information could be reported by the bot instead of wherever you normally find it. It's a matter of what you build it to do.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  How many users x requests do you have that a slack per error is actually something you can live with?
Noumenon72 4y ago
Weekly reminder to fill out a report is nice. I would like Jenkins to send me a Slack message when my build fails.
paxys 4y ago
Grafana alerts. GitHub PR requests. Jenkins builds. Surveys. Google Drive shares/comments. Dozens of other internal tooling integrations. I can't imagine working without slack bots at this point.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  How big is your team that the amount of these bot alerts is not something that just fades into background noise?
  - scaredginger 4y ago
    I think there's an obvious solution here. Slack bots that DM whoever is responsible; e.g. if I start a build and it fails, the bot DMs me and only me, no noise for my colleagues
LocalPCGuy 4y ago
Absolutely - couple examples that I've used in the last day or so: Github notifications (PR requests), Jira ticket updates (less useful), Figma notifications. Basically, Slack is aggregating the tool notifications into one place so I don't have to check email or each individual website.
lhoff 4y ago
We built a relay bit couple years ago. You can invite the bot into a private channel and then other users who are not part of the channel can use a form to send messages to that channel. The members of the Channel can then use the thread to answer. Works really well and has the effect that inter-department communication don't always need to go through the department heads. This could, of course be abused for spam, but so far it worked well.
agentdrtran 4y ago
absolutely, we rely on them for a few things and it's very nice
semitones 4y ago
We have a slackbot that announces when a new customer signs up for our service, with some info on them and links to view them in our admin dashboard + third-party apps. Also, once our app hears back from a third-party fraud-protection API, the slackbot will reply to the message with info on the result, and will also react to the announcement message with an appropriate emoji :) Helps out our support staff a bunch, reduces the surface area of the things they have to consistently look at. It's very useful for us right now at our current scale. Should we start getting an inordinate amount of new signups everyday, we will have to start relying on other methods to understand the signups.
CPLX 4y ago
Yeah to me it's like the main thing that makes Slack useful. I have a ton of them hooked up. I'm in the events business so I have a feed of ticket sales, there's a feed from the sales department of opps opened, there's a feed from Confluence that tells me when someone edited one of our internal wiki pages, we have a shout-outs channel connected to our employee recognition platform that gets lots of attention when peer to peer praise comes in, we have one that's connected to our customer help chatbot on the homepage, which is expecially useful for responding to very timely questions about live events almost instantly (we get a lot of love for that), and a few others. I'm always thinking of new ones to write. Having all the notifications just coming into one place is really good for "situational awareness" and I think it's one of Slack's main killer use cases.
thinker5555 4y ago
Yup. We have a bot that the user slacks directly with a product code, and the bot will query our WMS and return the location it's in and how many are on hand. Why not just query the WMS directly? Because our WMS charges per user account, but not for API/developer accounts. This way we can allow office personnel that only need to look up something every couple of days without being charged for accounts that hardly ever get used.
steveBK123 4y ago
(Grumpy senior engineer voice) "No." Pretty much any github/jifa/wiki/servicenow/error log/etc type chat bot integration immediately become background noise as soon as your team exceeds a size of about 4 or your user base exceeds a number you can count on your hands. Everyone slowly mutes or ignores notifications on those channels and goes about their day.
danpalmer 4y ago
How much experience do you have with Slack? It sounds like you might have been burnt by spammy bots in the past? Having used it for ~7 years at a bunch of companies, I can say with confidence that bots are a very core part of Slack’s value. There certainly are spammy notifications that sound useful and turn out not to be, but it’s not hard to keep the signal to noise ratio high with a little effort.

Has anyone ever found a bot-generated message in Slack to be useful?

by pbreit 4y ago

Has anyone ever found a bot-generated message in Slack to be useful?

zoover2020 4y ago

I'd say ChatOps is a very legitimate use case. But I see your underlying point of bots frontloaded with a lot of logic.

mod 4y ago

Sure. We used to have one that reported any error on any web app we had deployed. You could use other types of reporting, of course, but that worked for us. Any important information could be reported by the bot instead of wherever you normally find it. It's a matter of what you build it to do.

steveBK123 4y ago
How many users x requests do you have that a slack per error is actually something you can live with?

Noumenon72 4y ago

Weekly reminder to fill out a report is nice. I would like Jenkins to send me a Slack message when my build fails.

paxys 4y ago

Grafana alerts. GitHub PR requests. Jenkins builds. Surveys. Google Drive shares/comments. Dozens of other internal tooling integrations. I can't imagine working without slack bots at this point.

steveBK123 4y ago
How big is your team that the amount of these bot alerts is not something that just fades into background noise?
- scaredginger 4y ago
  I think there's an obvious solution here. Slack bots that DM whoever is responsible; e.g. if I start a build and it fails, the bot DMs me and only me, no noise for my colleagues

LocalPCGuy 4y ago

Absolutely - couple examples that I've used in the last day or so: Github notifications (PR requests), Jira ticket updates (less useful), Figma notifications. Basically, Slack is aggregating the tool notifications into one place so I don't have to check email or each individual website.

lhoff 4y ago

We built a relay bit couple years ago. You can invite the bot into a private channel and then other users who are not part of the channel can use a form to send messages to that channel. The members of the Channel can then use the thread to answer. Works really well and has the effect that inter-department communication don't always need to go through the department heads. This could, of course be abused for spam, but so far it worked well.

agentdrtran 4y ago

absolutely, we rely on them for a few things and it's very nice

semitones 4y ago

We have a slackbot that announces when a new customer signs up for our service, with some info on them and links to view them in our admin dashboard + third-party apps. Also, once our app hears back from a third-party fraud-protection API, the slackbot will reply to the message with info on the result, and will also react to the announcement message with an appropriate emoji :) Helps out our support staff a bunch, reduces the surface area of the things they have to consistently look at. It's very useful for us right now at our current scale. Should we start getting an inordinate amount of new signups everyday, we will have to start relying on other methods to understand the signups.

CPLX 4y ago

Yeah to me it's like the main thing that makes Slack useful. I have a ton of them hooked up. I'm in the events business so I have a feed of ticket sales, there's a feed from the sales department of opps opened, there's a feed from Confluence that tells me when someone edited one of our internal wiki pages, we have a shout-outs channel connected to our employee recognition platform that gets lots of attention when peer to peer praise comes in, we have one that's connected to our customer help chatbot on the homepage, which is expecially useful for responding to very timely questions about live events almost instantly (we get a lot of love for that), and a few others. I'm always thinking of new ones to write. Having all the notifications just coming into one place is really good for "situational awareness" and I think it's one of Slack's main killer use cases.

thinker5555 4y ago

Yup. We have a bot that the user slacks directly with a product code, and the bot will query our WMS and return the location it's in and how many are on hand. Why not just query the WMS directly? Because our WMS charges per user account, but not for API/developer accounts. This way we can allow office personnel that only need to look up something every couple of days without being charged for accounts that hardly ever get used.

steveBK123 4y ago

(Grumpy senior engineer voice) "No." Pretty much any github/jifa/wiki/servicenow/error log/etc type chat bot integration immediately become background noise as soon as your team exceeds a size of about 4 or your user base exceeds a number you can count on your hands. Everyone slowly mutes or ignores notifications on those channels and goes about their day.

danpalmer 4y ago

How much experience do you have with Slack? It sounds like you might have been burnt by spammy bots in the past? Having used it for ~7 years at a bunch of companies, I can say with confidence that bots are a very core part of Slack’s value. There certainly are spammy notifications that sound useful and turn out not to be, but it’s not hard to keep the signal to noise ratio high with a little effort.