A major goal of DevOps is task and process automation. While total automation is possible to a large extent, DevOps engineers can’t just run a process and then leave it. They need to quickly react in the event of downtime and incidents. Usually, it’s important to react as fast as possible because downtime for even a few minutes can cost from $2,300 to $9,000 according to the Ponemon Institute in 2016 and a 14-hour outrage cost Facebook an estimated $90 million in March 2019. That’s why we decided to review the best DevOps Slack apps to help your team reduce downtime and improve efficiency:
Every DevOps engineer needs a way to find out about system failures. The most popular channels are:
- SMS
- Mobile app notification
- Slack
We want to talk here about Slack as it’s one of the easiest and most popular communication tools. Most likely, your team already uses it, you have it installed on your desktop and mobile, and you won’t need to do any additional setup. It’s fast and convenient to use. Slack is not only a good messenger, but it has a lot of applications for DevOps engineers that will help increase the efficiency of your work processes. We decided to collect together the best Slack apps for DevOps alerts and more.
Top 10 DevOps Slack Apps that will help you to increase work efficiency
StatusGator
Our status page monitoring service, StatusGator, will help you monitor more than 2,770+ cloud services like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, GitHub, and many more. You can check the status of any service with Slack and get a notification if any component or region is down. It can save you valuable minutes when reacting during downtime. All you need to do is install the app and choose the services you use. You’ll receive proactive notifications in a Slack channel and you can query services on-demand with a slash command.
StatusGator has three different pricing plans for monitoring either 30, 200, or unlimited status pages. There’s also a risk-free 14-day free trial.
StatusPage
StatusPage by Atlassian is the largest status page hosting provider. Their Slack tool will help you monitor and maintain your status page. It can send a notification about the system’s status to the Slack channel. You’ll see updates about various events like posting, updating, and many others.
StatusPage has a free plan and four different variants for business needs, so you can choose the most appropriate for you.
Pingdom
This is a website monitoring service that gives information about uptime, downtime, and performance. It helps you to understand the current state of all your systems and alerts you of any unexpected troubles.
Pingdom has a free demo and a 14-day trial version. You can choose Synthetic Monitoring or Real User Monitoring and pay monthly or annually. The price depends on uptime checks.
Datadog
This is a cloud monitoring solution integrated with various services. It can help you monitor, troubleshoot, analyze, and optimize application performance. This tool will post the current state of the system in the Slack channel, so you will always understand what’s happening.
Datadog has a free trial period and a free version with limited functionality. Also, it has a lot of features and paid-for versions with additional functionality.
PagerDuty
This tool helps you to receive important notifications about incidents. Also, it helps to see who is on call and collaborate with other Slack users inviting them to the channel with slash commands.
PagerDuty has a 14-day free trial and three pricing plans called “Starter”, “Team” and “Business”. The price depends on the features and the number of users.
FireHydrant
FireHydrant helps to solve outages and incidents faster by compiling a timeline of events. You can receive information about incidents and create a Jira ticket, send an email, or add a note. Also, you can add your microservices and environments to improve your work process.
You can request a demo and see how it works. Also, the application has a free 14-day trial plus a limited free plan.
Alert Mixer
This is an incident management tool that will help you to connect monitor systems, analyze data, and receive notifications in Slack, by SMS, or by a phone call.
Alert Mixer has a free 14-day trial and a free plan with limited functionality. Also, you can choose between two paid plans called “Team” and “Business”.
Workbot
Workbot is a bot for Slack by Workato. It helps configure workflows and send custom and actionable notifications. It can automate ChatOps, orchestrate approval workflows, as well as connect support, sales, and marketing.
You can add different apps to the bot and integrate them with your system. You can request a demo before you start using it.
Halp
This is a conversational ticketing solution for Operations and IT teams. It can assign, manage, prioritize, and report on requests using Slack. With Halp you can turn Slack messages into tickets with emoji or slash commands.
You can try a free 14-day trial and choose one of three pricing variants for a team, business or enterprise.
YellowAnt
YellowAnt is a bot for Slack that can automate your work by taking commands for all workplaces, getting real-time notifications, and letting you create cross-application workflows. The bot is integrated with lots of applications you already use.
YellowAnt has a free plan and three different pricing options with additional functions.
Conclusion: What are the best Slack Apps for DevOps?
We have collected together 10 of the best DevOps Slack Apps that will help you monitor the state of your systems. We have analyzed the results and looked at which are the most valuable – to receive notifications about downtime and failures. Our top 10 picks:
It’s hard to choose the best of the best because the choice is dependent on your needs and projects. Each app offers a different solution to a different problem. If you have just started your DevOps team, or you are working on a small project, you won’t need some of these large Enterprise services designed for big projects. You should estimate the application’s features and price, and choose the most appropriate app for your team. And don’t forget, many of these products and services have free trial periods to better understand the features that best suit you.
StatusGator is our service that monitors status pages and sends you notifications when the services you care about go down. You can receive notifications in Slack or by email, SMS, or even webhook. Customers love our Slack slash command which allows querying the status of any service on demand right from where your team hangs out.
Try a 14-day free trial of StatusGator and let us know what you think.
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