Splunk Bot

Inspiration

When working on operational support items we tend to collaborate with others in chat rooms like HipChat, Slack or CampFire. This allows us to determine root cause issues and resolve them. However, we use tools like Splunk to help diagnose the issues and we need to share results of searches etc. with other. To this we do a lot of copy/past, but what if Splunk is just a collaborator.

This is the concept of ChatOps where a bot is just a collaborator. A bot is just a collaborator in your group that’s controlled by a computer program instead of a human and often responds to specially formatted commands. They can answer questions, notify you of important things, deploy the latest version of your website, and be a source of Splunk fun.

The Splunk Bot would listen for requests and directly execute them in splunk like the CLI. The results are then shared in the chat session.

How it works

In a tool like HipChat you would interact with the bot by issuing commands. The commands then get sent to a Splunk Search head for execution. The search / command gets executed and the results are rendered back to the chat session.

Challenges I ran into

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

What I learned

What's next for Splunk Bot