Hubot

We 🧡 the combination of Grafana, Hubot & Slack. We use it all the time to visualize dashboards in Slack. But the interaction with certain dashboards might not be as fast as one expect from a chat bot, so let’s see what we can do.

So far I’ve been using the hubot-pretend package for the testing of the hubot-command-mapper. But as that test package is no longer maintained / updated, I wanted to switch to something that is more in line with what Hubot itself does: hubot-mock-adapter.

At Wehkamp, we use the Hubot Grafana project to make our Grafana dashboard available in Slack. It mainly helps our standby team to make quick assessments on what’s going on with our website. Last year, we saw we could not upgrade the package from 2.5.2 to 3.0.1, because slugs could not be used anymore. But we use slugs and… quite heavily! So we did not upgrade our Grafana v7… until we got hit by the input field bug. We decided to see what we could do to bring our slug feature back to our ChatOps bot!

To give teams a jump start we’ve created the bot-zero open source project. It solves some setup and development problems. In this blog I’ll show how to get up and running in minutes and I’ll explain some of the choices we’ve made.

If you set up a new Hubot using the Slack Developer Kit for Hubot you’ll get an awesome bot, but with a lot of useless stuff in it. In this blog I’ll outline all the things that can be safely cleaned up. The scripts can run on both Powershell (Windows) and Bash (Linux/Mac).

Lately we’ve been playing around with ChatOps at Wehkamp. We added a Hubot to our Slack channels to automate some operational jobs. It makes work more fun and way easier. As it is hosted in our own infrastructure, it can interact with our micro-services. In this article I explore how to use ES6 and a Promise to implement a call to a simple web-service.