RigD’s 2018 release showed how Machine Learning /AI driven automation can augment and assist Ops daily to improve incident coordination significantly. We proved this through fast and easy PagerDuty interaction right in Slack. Our original launch solved the problem of PagerDuty users and teams who work in Slack and need the power of PagerDuty at their fingertips, whether it be Feeds, driving PagerDuty functionality from a simple conversational UI, or using the RigD concept of “working an incident” to get and leverage an incident digest.

 

Our latest release adds a significant number of platform, Slack App / bot and integration capabilities to streamline triage and other problems that DevOps and IT Operations have when supporting business critical services.  This release solves the problem of support teams needing to speed up the triage process of a service outage through intelligent automation and advanced diagnostic and data collection flows – helping them supercharge their incident lifecycle coordination with intelligent automation. What our solution demonstrates to businesses and the industry at large is that machine learning and AI can be applied to simplifying and augmenting human activity. DevOps teams who use it to detect and solve problems before they become prolonged major issues can reduce workloads, speed up cycle times and get customer facing services back up and running faster.

Platform Services

Go with the Flow

Our Flows are now GA. That means you can write powerful automation right in Slack in an amazingly simple way. You can even start building a flow from an incident digest. 

What was Problem:  There are far too many repetitive tasks in a support session and when service outages occur it takes too long to gather the team and all the information needed to triage. Support teams want to speed up the process and increase the quality of life around support.  Who wants to type the same thing for the 100^th time? 

Our Solution:  RigD now can run automation flows so that individuals and teams can expedite data gathering and even capture and save the best support sequences from a Slack conversation to guide the work next time.

Triage Flow Builder

To help you solve incidents faster we added our own “wizard” flow to RigD that helps walk you through creating a flow to help with your incident triage process. In just a few minutes setup you will have a triage flow that can cut minutes off your incident resolution times. Set it up once, use it as many times as you want.

What was the Problem: Setting up automation can take time and expertise.   Developer and Support teams want to get going quickly and use their processes and tools.   

Our Solution: RigD lets users quickly create triage flows that can be reused by teams and edited to accommodate your growing support and triage knowledge and processes. 

Custom Activities

Our custom activity services are now GA. Turn your own AWS lambda functions into super cool NLP powered activities in Slack. Custom Activities work just like an out of the box one so you get all the benefit of our input suggestions and can use them in flows. 

What was the Problem: DevOps and IT Operations teams have a multitude of options for monitoring, log management, configuration, architecture and deployment platforms.  These teams need an extensible and open way to integration all their specific tools 

Our Solution: Custom activities allow you to build upon the existing out of the box RigD activities and build custom activities to your favorite tool, whether they be commercial or something specifically you have built for your company.

RigD Bot (Virtual Assistant for DevOps & IT Ops)

Better Bot interaction. RigD learned better social queues. 

RigD will still respond to direct commands anywhere any time when he knows what you want. However, for more open ended interactions; you can use @RigD to let him know your talking to him in channels or type away in a direct message and he will always respond.

What was the Problem:  Support staff need to speed up their incident lifecycle coordination and triage activities to get the service back up quickly.   

Our Solution:  RigD can respond directly when you need it to do specific work by using @rigd, or let the bot figure out what you need based upon the natural language capabilities 

More Helpful Help 

You can now get a lot more help on a lot more topics. Everything from high level help on what RigD is to individual activity help with a handy “run activity” button 

What was the Problem:  No one likes to read the manual (and nowadays we don’t even have one) Support users like to use the slack interface to get the most out of the bot though conversational help. 

Our Solution:  RigD’s help is greatly improved with natural language-based help from high level topics to help on a specific activity 

RigD is the new kid on the BlockKit 

We love playing with blocks, so we are excited
to have heavily integrated with Slacks new BlockKit.
It’s a fresh new look and gave us the ability to deliver a lot of new UI based
controls for more convenience. You won’t see it in use for every activity just
yet, but we will get there soon. 

What was the Problem:  We all have come to expect top shelf experience when we use a bot or virtual assistant.  We want increasing ease of use 

Our Solution:  RigD uses the latest Slack technology for user interaction, making it best in class for a Bot.

Partner Integrations

New More Secure PagerDuty Connections 

We heard you load and clear, so we worked with PagerDuty to build a new OAuth2 integration for adding a PagerDuty tool to RigD. This makes for a simpler and more secure tool setup through RigD. Two new activities as well were added: update incident priorities and automatically set a channel topic with on call info.

More Out of the Box Integrations around the Incident Lifecycle 

We’ve added more activities and a few new tools. Naturally an operational triage and remediation session requires the areas of incident management (PagerDuty), Status Dashboards (Atlassian Status Page), getting operational metrics and logs from operational tools (Datadog, AWS SNS, Cloudwatch and more) You can expect to see more great content all the time, and if you don’t see something you need, just ask. 

The interest in bots that solve problems for humans is on the rise, especially in the application support software space. It is a growing trend. Why?  Partly it’s the wild success Slack is enjoying along with DevOps and IT Operations teams recognizing that bots with very specific skills and scope help humans do some heavy lifting with less fuss and stress. Slack is where Ops teams meet, so SlackOps that can turn a Slack channel into a command center for the team will naturally make it easier to collaborate and work faster. Disparate tools and data are no issue for SlackOps because a good bot-platform combo can pull the data they need right into Slack when they need it.  So why waste time gathering people and information when you could be solving the issue instead?

Free Trial and Updated Pricing

See how a bot can help you with mundane repetitive tasks and even many harder tasks, try out RigD with our free 30 day trial here. We have also updated our pricing which is quite simple and sensible.