How ChatOps is changing the game for incident management
Share on socials
How ChatOps is changing the game for incident management
Josiah Tillett
Published on 24 October 2025
10 min read
Josiah Tillett
Published on 24 October 2025
10 min read
Jump to section
Jump to section
What is ChatOps?
Where does ChatOps come from?
What are the benefits of ChatOps?
How does ChatOps work in incident management?
What does a ChatOps setup include?
Typical incident management workflow with ChatOps
ChatOps best practices for incident management
Ready to transform your incident management with ChatOps?
Get in touch
ChatOps combines chat platforms with operational tools to accelerate incident management. This blog covers what it is, how it works, and best practices.
Organisations choosing to integrate their chat platform into operational tools and systems are leading the way in incident management – and their strategic approach is called ChatOps.
ChatOps is impacting the speed and efficiency of incident management, driving better communication, greater visibility, and giving your people all the knowledge they need in one place: goodbye context switching.
In this blog, we’re taking a closer look at what ChatOps is, how it works, typical tools and workflows, and the benefits and best practices you need to know about. So strap in, it's time to start chatting…
What is ChatOps?
ChatOps, as the name suggests, is the practice of integrating your preferred chat platform (like Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Discord) with your operational tools and systems. It’s an approach designed to streamline workflows by bringing conversations and the actions that result from them into one space. The result? Teams can collaborate in real-time, leverage their chat platform’s automation features to help with repetitive tasks, and respond to issues quickly and efficiently in the chat space they’re already familiar with.
Where does ChatOps come from?
ChatOps has evolved over time to become a key component in DevOps and IT operations, and it’s been around a bit longer than you might think. Popularised by GitHub in the early 2010s with the use of Hubot, it transformed chat platforms from simple communication tools into operational hubs. Soon, these chat tools were the collaborative meeting place where deployments, monitoring, and incident responses were happening.
What are the benefits of ChatOps?
If you've yet to incorporate ChatOps into your workflows, then here are some of the benefits you can look forward to:
Improved collaboration and communication
ChatOps brings technical teams, business stakeholders, and incident responders together in one shared platform. By integrating chat with your operational tools, all your people can work from a single source of truth. This reduces silos and ensures updates, actions, and decision-making happen in real-time.
Enhanced visibility and transparency
With all your actions and discussions logged in the chat channel, you have a complete timeline of any issue or incident. With this transparency comes greater accountability, easier handovers, and a valuable knowledge base for post-incident reviews and audits.
Faster decision-making and response times
And there’s no need for context switching, with alerts, diagnostics, and automated commands all in one place. So you can speed up decision-making and response times. Your people can investigate issues more efficiently, run commands, and collaborate in an instant, reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR).
All the knowledge at your fingertips
Incident management platforms (see below) automatically create incident bridges – shared calls to discuss an incident in progress – for new incidents, such as channels in Teams or Slack. And with integrated keyword search, it's easy to find information about past incidents and solutions in your chat platforms, too.
How does ChatOps work in incident management?
When speed and coordination are this critical, ChatOps helps centralise and organise communication and actions in one place. It reduces response times, eliminates confusion, and keeps all your stakeholders up to date.
With ChatOps, when an incident occurs, your teams can:
- Collaborate in real-time in a shared chat space, so everyone has eyes on the same information.
- Trigger automated workflows, like creating a ticket or escalating, without context switching.
- Instantly access system data inside the conversation, like logs, metrics, and monitoring alerts.
- Maintain a full audit trail of their discussions, decisions, and actions.
What does a ChatOps setup include?
While every setup is different and designed to meet the individual needs of the organisation it serves, these are the key components required for ChatOps to take place:
Chat platform
This is the central hub where all your conversations and commands happen. Think of it as a collaborative command centre where responders have a single point of visibility. Examples include Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Discord.
Integration with monitoring tools
These help feed real-time alerts from your monitoring tools (like Nagios, AWS Cloudwatch, Datadog, Site24x7, etc.) into your chat platform, helping teams see any issues or system failures without needing to switch tools.
Incident management platform
This is where all your incidents are logged, prioritised, and managed in line with your organisational priorities and processes. Integrating your platform, like Jira Service Management (JSM), ServiceNow, Atlassian Compass, or PagerDuty, with your chat platform helps automate ticket creation, escalation, and tracking.
Automation and bots
You'll also need chatbots that execute commands and run your playbooks in the background. These help to reduce manual effort and standardise your response actions. Platforms like Teams and Slack now come with robust automation functionality that allows your team to build apps and actions that can trigger events in your environments.
Knowledge and documentation
And don't forget about storing all that knowledge. Integrating your chat platform with tools like Confluence means teams can easily access runbooks, FAQs, and historical incident reports right from the chat.
Typical incident management workflow with ChatOps
Once you're up and running with ChatOps, this is what a typical incident management workflow could look like:
- A problem is detected by your incident management platform, typically through an automated monitoring tool. For example, this could be high CPU usage or downtime.
- An alert is then triggered, and the appropriate responder is paged. This is usually by phone call or SMS, but could also happen through chat platforms during working hours.
- An incident is declared by the responder in your incident management platform. This automatically opens an incident bridge and chat channel for real-time collaboration in your chat platform. If your team has a centralised channel for incident declaration, the incident will also be posted there to alert wider stakeholders, too.
- The team discussion takes place in the chat platform until a cause and resolution have been established. Monitoring data, logs, and diagnostic commands can all be surfaced in-channel. The chat record captures all discussions and actions, creating a live incident timeline.
- Once the cause is identified and resolved, your incident management platform updates the status, and the dedicated incident channel is archived, preserving the history for reviews or audits.
With ChatOps, you can build out automations to do whatever you need. Solutions that integrate with Slack or Teams will often have predefined actions alongside the ability to create your own. Here are some examples of automated actions and commands that can be executed right from the chat interface:
- System restart – triggers a bot to safely restart a failing service.
- Log retrieval – pulls the latest logs into the chat channel for immediate analysis.
- Incident update – posts an update to your stakeholders and syncs it with your incident management tool so everyone knows what's happening.
ChatOps best practices for incident management
Establish clear communication protocols
It all comes back to clear communication. You'll need to define how and when responders communicate. For example, communication frequency, concise, factual updates, and clear roles to prevent confusion.
Integrate seamlessly with your existing tools
Choose suitable integrations that align with your existing systems, whether that’s JSM, ServiceNow, or PagerDuty. Test them regularly to make sure they’re reliable, and use standardised workflows so everyone works the same, no matter which team they’re in.
Automate repetitive tasks
This includes common actions, like incident declaration, channel creation, ticket updates, etc. You can use chatbots or orchestration platforms to handle them. This will cut down manual errors and speed up response times, so you can focus on finding the cause.
Maintain a centralised knowledge base
Every incident, action, and lesson learned should be documented in the same place (we like Confluence!). You can then link these knowledge base entries into your ChatOps workflows for easy reference. Avoid knowledge silos and make it accessible, improving your readiness for future incidents.
Regularly review and optimise workflows
Keep track of how ChatOps has helped or hindered your response with regular post-incident reviews. If there are gaps, work to refine your processes. And be sure to adapt workflows to meet your business's needs, tool updates, and team structures as they evolve.
Ready to transform your incident management with ChatOps?
ChatOps is changing the game for incident management, making it easier to collaborate and communicate in real-time to resolve issues as they arise. It enhances visibility and transparency, speeds up decision-making, and reduces your MTTR. What's more, with ChatOps implemented, you have all the knowledge you need in one place, so you can document and learn from every incident.
If you want to realise these benefits but aren't sure where to start, we're here to help. Get in touch to have a chat about how ChatOps can transform your incident management efforts today.
Get in touch
Whether you're just getting started or looking to optimise your existing setup, our team can help you implement ChatOps practices that reduce response times, improve collaboration, and keep your systems running smoothly.
Written by
DevOps Consultant