HOW AN AUTOMATION FIRST ETHOS CREATED ‘ALARM BOT’

Every monitoring improvement, however small, that the Versent Managed Services (VMS) team learn along the way now gets fed into these recipes, further developing Alarm Bot.

As some of you may know (and if not, you have a slew of great videos to catch up on during your commute tomorrow) AWS frequently host partners and clients with interesting design patterns and then showcase these patterns as a part of ‘This is my architecture’ and the closely coupled ‘This is my code’.

Recently the VMS team was asked to showcase Alarm Bot, you can check out the video directly on Youtube here:

Why did we create Alarm Bot?

Alarm Bot was born out of a brilliant idea at a standup one morning. Our initial goal was to automate alerting for a particular customer, but along the way we realised that we were building a tool that could be used to solve the same problem everywhere.

Why is it so cool?

It’s all AWS native – nothing new needs to be installed, and it scales exceptionally well (like all AWS services), as our customers scale up their AWS usage. Configuration is easy, and driven by code.

Is it being rolled out to other customers?‍

AlarmBot is a part of the VMS toolkit – every time VMS begins work with a new customer, we bring all our tools with us. Every monitoring improvement we make here on in, however small, is considered for integration into the base AWS service monitoring recipes.

How did you find the time to build Alarm Bot?

Alarm Bot is a product of Versent’s ‘automation first’ ethos and we’re really proud of the team for taking the time to do this with discipline that kept it focused and simple alongside the passion to produce something a master craftsman would be proud of.