Using Micro Focus Chatbots with Microsoft Teams

Transcription

1 White Paper IT Operations Management Using Micro Focus Chatbots with Microsoft Teams A seamless connection for improved collaboration within IT operations

2 The adoption of ChatOps is accelerating with the growth of group collaboration (persistent chat) tools which create a digital workspace that empowers people to work together on common projects. Executive Summary IT Operations Management (ITOps) is a prime environment for digital transformation. As IT operations become more advanced, traditional incident management processes are not keeping up. IT war rooms, created to quickly resolve issues, are often organizational pain-points. There is an ever-growing need to improve outdated ITOps processes by increasing the visibility, automation, accessibility and transparency around incident management. In this paper we will look at how ChatOps delivers exactly these benefits, and how Micro Focus Chatbots and Microsoft Teams bring together all the tools you need to realize the benefits in your IT organization. A Brief History of ChatOps The term ChatOps was first used in 2013 by GitHub, a highly distributed company with employees ( Hubbers ) spread throughout the world. The teams at GitHub found that running the day-to-day operations of a complex, always-on, distributed service strained both development and operations teams. Individual Hubbers used phone calls and long threads to resolve issues. As GitHub grew, the toll from wasted time, duplication of work, and lack of systemic collaboration became extremely expensive. The solution the GitHub team developed was ChatOps, which allowed them to manage and maintain operations and technical teams through a collaborative chat interface, and allowed them to use chatbots to do the heavy lifting. Since then, ChatOps have been adopted widely by companies seeking to address similar organizational (operational) challenges. The adoption of ChatOps is accelerating with the growth of group collaboration (persistent chat) tools which create a digital workspace that empowers people to work together on common projects. These tools allow users to create channels to organize conversations into topics, workstreams or activities. Theses platforms can also be extended to integrate with other services including LOB apps and chatbots, to allow users to manage complex workflows through more natural speech or text-based commands. ChatOps as a Technology Changer Micro Focus Chatbots and Microsoft Teams are transforming ChatOps, by bringing people, IT operations, and Chatbots together to collaborate in a single tool. ChatOps users no longer need to switch between applications to perform individual tasks. Chatbots run between the group collaboration tool and IT applications to gather data, execute commands, and leverage such things as machine learning and analytics. With ChatOps, IT operations staff interact with their systems and tools via a single conversational UI. Chatbots abstract everyday tools during conversation, and interactions within the user interface (UI) to create a high 1

3 White Paper Using Micro Focus Chatbots with Microsoft Teams degree of visibility, which fosters more efficient collaboration. Visibility encourages the sharing of best practices and helps team members support each other to create consistent, desirable outcomes together. ChatOps Benefits Micro Focus and Microsoft Teams are transforming ChatOps, by bringing people, IT operations, and Chatbots together to collaborate in a single tool. Visibility: Enterprise chatbots expose internal services to a wider audience within the company in a simple, accessible way. Automation: Chatbots make task automation easy, repeatable, and low risk. For example, in January of 2017, a Micro Focus customer (University of Pretoria) found a 60 percent increase in service desk utilization and logging of high-quality data for major Incidents. That improvement was due to the automation that chatbots provided IT practitioners who were responsible for updating incidents. Transparency: Although ChatOps enables real-time collaboration between people in a channel, you don t need to be active in conversations to benefit. When you log into your team, you will see holistic conversations and assigned tasks. There s no need to log into multiple backend systems; your Chatbot native authentication capability provides a single authentication to get the right information from backend systems. Accessiblity: At the heart of ChatOps, what these bots really do is put the tools in the middle of the conversation. You are working in the same place as you are collaborating. In all, these benefits can result in the transformation of your ITOps environment and deliver significant savings in the time, money, and effort needed to run your IT organization. Spend more time focused on the opportunities of the future than the challenges of the present. Incident Management, with and without ChatOps You know the drill. You re happily immersed in your productive, day-to-day routine when someone in the team notices that something is catastrophically broken. What s wrong? What needs to be done? Who should do it? Where are those people? Wherever they are, their productive, day-to-day routine is disrupted while a degree of panic and turmoil reigns. You ve all been sucked into a black hole of resources and time. Use Case of a Major Service Disruption without ChatOps Traditionally, service disruptions are handled something like this: The operations center receives an event notification via or text. Staff begin basic diagnostics. Non-operations staff make independent attempts to troubleshoot. Those side conversations divert them from their regular tasks. 2

4 The incident coordinator doesn t need to schedule a retrospective as the entire incident is captured in Microsoft Teams. The severity or impact of the issue warrants escalation to an incident war-room. The incident coordinator uses valuable time (often a couple of hours) finding the right people and establishing a flow / exchange of ideas. Every person who joins the phone bridge needs to be informed about the issue while the war-room is attempting to remediate it.. Those side meetings divert current war-room participants from the task at hand. During the war-room, each person works on a segregated system of his or her particular expertise service desk, application monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, web or application team information, database or server group information, etc. Efforts are siloed. War room participants need to convey their (siloed) findings over the phone bridge. This turns into an exercise in tell and not show. Participants must rely on guessing what their colleagues are describing. In cases where findings are too complex to describe, a participant must use to share data and graphs. For the receiving participants, switching between phone conversations and long threads is time-consuming and distracting. Changes to the incident must be manually entered in the service manager UI. Changes can include: creating the incident ticket, updating, assigning / re-assigning, adding notes, and closing the ticket. The issue is resolved. However, despite being resolved, the incident is undocumented. The incident coordinator schedules a retrospective to document both the root cause and the steps to resolve the incident. The retrospective takes time away from regular work tasks and often forces participant to rely upon their memories of the incident. Documenting memories of a chaotic war-room introduces the likelihood that details will be omitted or disputed Use Case of Major Service Disruption with ChatOps You re happily immersed in your productive, day-to-day routine when you receive a notice in a Microsoft Teams channel via a bot alerting you to a major incident. The people, chatbots, and systems necessary to solve the problem are instantly available. It s no guarantee against panic, but it does make the best use of your time and resources. Here is how a major service disruption is handled when using ChatOps: The initiating event pops up in an existing MS Teams channel that monitors such events, and all the members of the channel see the event and begin triage. The collaborators communicate and assist each other. The severity or impact of the issue warrants an escalation. With the help of chatbots information from all the affected systems service desk, application monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, database or server group information are pulled in. 3

5 White Paper Using Micro Focus Chatbots with Microsoft Teams When collaborators use a Chatbot, its actions are logged within the conversation timeline, allowing all participants to gain visibility to everything that has already been tried. Collaborators identify a root cause and decide on a solution that is then given to a chatbot to run. The issue is resolved. The incident is resolved and fully documented. The incident coordinator doesn t need to schedule a retrospective as the entire incident is captured in Microsoft Teams. The Incident Manager returns to regular work tasks knowing that all knowledge gained from the incident was preserved and available for reference in future incidents. Getting started with ChatOps using Micro Focus Chatbots and Microsoft Teams is very simple. Simply add the chatbot as an app with in Teams. Once all the necessary configurations are done the bot is available for communications like any other user with in Teams. Choosing the Right Platform to Drive Adoption: Why Microsoft Teams Over the past few years, there s been a dramatic increase in the amount of collaboration. Employees are on twice as many teams as they were five years ago. The amount of time employees spend engaged in collaborative work including meetings, on phone calls or answering s has increased by about 50 percent. Companies that invest in collaboration and teamwork are five times more likely to be high performing. Microsoft Teams was built to address this evolution in collaboration and provides the ideal platform for ChatOps communication. Microsoft Teams provides a true persistent chat-based hub for teamwork and gives IT the opportunity to create a more open, fluid, and digital environment. Bring everything together including chats, meetings, calls, files, and tools to enable more productive teamwork to resolve issues. Teams is extensible with support for bots, Connectors and other integrations with apps your team uses every day, including Micro Focus, to reduce context switching and enable you to take action quickly. The incident coordinator doesn t need to schedule a retrospective as the entire incident is captured in Microsoft Teams. Benefit from the Office 365 hyper-scale, enterprise-grade cloud. Microsoft Teams comes with the enterprise grade security, compliance and manageability that you expect from Office 365. With Teams, you can manage and monitor all features in one centralized portal including: data encryption at all times, at-rest and in-transit; the ability to have local data residency for core customer data at rest, plus failover and disaster recovery; multi-factor authentication for enhanced identity protection. Microsoft Teams supports key standards including SOC 1, SOC 2, EU Model Clauses, HIPPA, and more. Teams includes features for compliance and litigation support, including audit log search, ediscovery and legal hold for channels, chats and files. 4

6 The practice of ChatOps is being adopted by Enterprises that understand agility as the key differentiator between success and failure in our fastpaced, mobile world. The Office apps and services that people use every day including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, SharePoint as well as the new Planner task management app, Stream video portal, even Power BI, are all built-in, so you have the information and tools you need right within the context of Microsoft Teams. With Teams included in all Office 365 Business and Office 365 Enterprise SKUs, if you re using Office 365 in your company, you already have this tool! Microsoft Teams and Micro Focus Chatbots Getting started with ChatOps using Micro Focus Chatbots and Microsoft Teams is very simple. Simply add the chatbot as an app with in Teams. Once all the necessary configurations are done the bot is available for communications like any other user with in Teams. Figure 1. Chatbots The Chatbots deliver necessary information when asked to do so, and all the participants can leverage the information obtained by the Chatbot to accomplish various different task and resolve issues with more insight. The Chatbots eliminate the need for context switching as all information obtained from the needed IT Ops Tools are delivered right there in the MS Teams channel and are beautifully rendered. 5

7 Contact us at: Conclusion The Chatbot disruption began in the consumer space, with companies such as Apple and Google releasing quickly-adopted chat tools powered by Chatbots. Although still very new, it s clear that ChatOps will continue that disruption into the enterprise space, resulting in changes to ITOps that are as profound as the DevOps revolution was to application development. However collaboration is one of the pillars which ChatOps rests on. Microsoft Teams delivers the needed enterprise wide collaboration solution and the platform in which users can interface with Microfocus Chatbots. The practice of ChatOps is being adopted by Enterprises that understand agility as the key differentiator between success and failure in our fast-paced, mobile world. The ChatOps practice brings two key benefits to enterprise IT accessibility and artificial intelligence. The resulting savings of time, effort, and dollars can be used for innovation that will truly accelerate your business. Learn More At /itom M 09/ Micro Focus or one of its affiliates. Micro Focus and the Micro Focus logo, among others, are trademarks or registered trademarks of Micro Focus or its subsidiaries or affiliated companies in the United Kingdom, United States and other countries. All other marks are the property of their respective owners.