ChatOps can speed up organizations’ responses to user needs while relieving support staff of a lot of tedious activities. Many helpdesk or IT tickets are entered for routine end-user questions, such as finding out what hours you’re open or changing a password. However, organizations have also moved toward automating development and required operations through a process popularly known as DevOps.

Communication within organizations has evolved from email threads to real-time chats. With the vast potential of real-time messaging, organizations are beginning to explore how they could make these chat applications do more. We now even have a name for this phenomenon — ChatOps. To get a taste of the power of ChatOps in action, let’s build a ChatOps bot that sits in a Mattermost channel with Errbot.

From setting up new hires with everything they need to get to work to troubleshooting technical difficulties, IT teams often field the same kinds of requests over and over. And while each request might feel like a small task, collectively they can add up to a huge time sink in the long run.

The right tools enable your team to ship amazing code quickly. But between building, deploying, testing, monitoring, and maintaining software, all those great tools can create a lot of stuff to keep track of. Luckily, there’s a solution to this problem: ChatOps. ChatOps is a collective approach to running DevOps workflows and building a collaborative team culture.

The way we socialize, learn, shop, and receive care has changed drastically over the last 18 months. For many of us, perhaps one of the most drastic changes was the way we work. While work from home (WFH) was an option before the pandemic, NCCI states, “only 6% of the employed worked primarily from home and about three-quarters of workers had never worked from home.” Fast forward to 2021, and according to NorthOne, here’s how much things have changed.

ChatOps has become an integral part of software development and IT operations, as teams rely on automated notifications to take the place of manual alerts. In the past, if there was an alert, someone would need to manually find that notification. Then, they would have contact team members to notify them one by one so they could start working on a resolution. In this complex network of communications, it was easy to lose information, duplicate work, and simply waste time coordinating the team.

In this new world of digital everything, new application versions usually mean that you’re going to get bigger and better features, more capabilities, and an uplifted user experience, right? When I talk to customers, many can’t wait to upgrade the PagerDuty integrations that they depend on to test new features. If you’re a PagerDuty for Slack user, the next-generation version of our Slack integration will certainly be an exciting development.

n8n is a fair-code licensed tool that helps you automate tasks, sync data between various sources, and react to events — all via a visual workflow editor. Our team has been using Mattermost for internal communication since the very beginning, and in time we have developed a ChatOps practice by integrating Mattermost with our workflows. In this article, we present five of our favorite use cases of n8n with Mattermost, for both work productivity and team engagement.