#operations: Setup an Operations Slack Channel for your Team!

I had some fun with glow sticks.

“Situations like this only reinforce my deep suspicion of developers: They’re often carelessly breaking things and then disappearing, leaving Operations to clean up the mess.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

This quote exemplifies why the Second Way of DevOps (creating feedback loops) is massively important.

Creating feedback loops ensures that necessary corrections can be made continuously and give the ability to respond to issues quickly. This, in turn, makes everyone accountable for any code that they commit.

In projects past, I’ve leveraged Slack’s powerful integration suite to set up lightweight and informative internal feedback loops. We centralize all of this feedback into a single channel which I usually call #operations

Integrations in this area could use Jira, Bitbucket, Bitbucket Pipelines, Codecov, Docker Cloud, Datadog, etc…. These cover the basic checkpoints in our workflow.

At a very high level, work enters through Jira. During development, feedback is given through Jira and Bitbucket as code gets committed and pull requests are created.

After a pull request gets merged, Bitbucket provides additional feedback on the integration testing and deployment. Docker Cloud and Codecov bud in here, too, giving their two cents on the build.

Finally, Datadog handles the production monitoring and barks here if there is trouble.

Additionally, names are attached to builds to ensure accountability. This is not a measure to embarrass or blame people but rather a means to direct assistance and resources to fix problems.

The default sidebar colour schemes are a nice touch too. This helps non-technical folks get a feel of what's occurring very quickly. However, as a side note, this channel will become very verbose and controlling what information gets displayed becomes increasingly important. One thing that we learned very quickly was that an overly noisy channel is an ignored channel.

Your team may have a different tool set altogether, but it is key to understand your workflow and attach these metrics to gain visibility. Slack has been an awesome tool for achieving this for a few reasons:

1. Many integration setups only take a few minutes.
2. Everyone on your team effectively has a pager and can be more responsive when issues do arise.

I won’t go into detail about how to integrate each tool, there exists a myriad of documentation to help your team accomplish that.

I do suggest that you begin your journey here. Take the time to set these integrations up, it may take time, but the added benefits will pay you back in spades!

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