Today, we introduce you to a new series of posts we’re doing on the Mattermost blog: Mattermost Recipes. The goal of these posts is to provide you with solutions to specific problems, as well as a discussion about the details of the solution and some tips about how to customize it to suit your needs perfectly.

Computer programs that talk to people aren’t new. The natural language processing program ELIZA , which played the role of a digital psychologist, first debuted way back in 1966. This early chatbot was capable of “listening” to you as you shared your life story, delivering mostly coherent, yet vague canned responses to whatever you typed in.

Imagine the following scenario: A critical incident hits. You have a few different teams on it throughout the company. Managers and other stakeholders need to be updated every thirty minutes. But the biggest issue is that you need to engage with external service providers. You need your communication provider and hosting service to check on their side and report back. You want a consultant in the picture and an external help desk service might be involved as well.

We are proud to introduce a new uptime test type – ping. As an addition to usual http test, now it’s possible to test a server via ICMP (ping).