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AWS Chatbot now integrated into Microsoft Teams

The chatbot’s integration will allow enterprise users to get notifications about events such as security risks and the status of system health from within Teams, and also let them run command line interface commands to run notebooks to address issues.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has integrated its AWS Chatbot into Microsoft Teams to allow enterprise users to interact with their AWS resources from within the chat application.

AWS Chatbot, which was first showcased in 2019 and made generally available in 2020, is a service that offers enterprise development and IT teams to receive notifications about their AWS infrastructure resources from within a productivity or chat application such as Slack.

“When using AWS Chatbot for Microsoft Teams or other chat platforms, you receive notifications from AWS services directly in your chat channels, and you can take action on your infrastructure by typing commands without having to switch to another tool,” Sébastien Stormacq, principal developer advocate at AWS, wrote in a blog post.

The interaction with AWS infrastructure and resources is made possible with the integration of the chat application with AWS services such as Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS).

While Amazon CloudWatch is a service that is used to collect, and visualise real-time logs, metrics, and event data in automated dashboards, SNS is a push notification service between AWS’ distributed systems, microservices, serverless applications, and endpoints.

The applications included in AWS SNS are Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, AWS Lambda, and other HTTPS endpoints, the company said.

The integration of AWS’ EventBridge service with SNS allows the chatbot to send event-related information to the supported chat applications.

AWS Chatbot within Teams also allows enterprise users to run command line interface commands to run notebooks to address issues. Long commands that users tend to forget can be stored by creating aliases within the AWS Chatbot channel in Teams and other applications, the company said.

Notebooks are repositories that house executable codes for programs.

To add AWS Chatbot to Microsoft Teams, enterprises need to add the bot to the relevant team or group inside the application. After that, the URL of the team can be used to configure the chatbot from within AWS Management Console or AWS Cloud Development Kit.

Enterprises need to assign identity and access management permissions on what channel members can do in this channel and associate SNS topics to receive notifications, Stormacq wrote in the post.

At the time of the launch in 2019, AWS Chatbot was supported on Slack and AWS Chime. Other services that AWS Chatbot can send notifications about include AWS Health, AWS Budgets, AWS Security Hub, Amazon GuardDuty, CloudWatch, and CloudFormation.