No news is bad news
Today I encountered an issue with AWS Chatbot. Chatbot is the AWS service I use to send triggered CloudWatch alarms into Slack. Unlike email, people might actually read them there.
Issues with Chatbot aren’t unusual. I’ve been using it since it was in beta*, and have encountered some frankly weird quirks. However, today was different. A quick Google of the error message returned the result that makes every DevOps Engineers heart sink.
*AWS Chatbot is now GA and much more stable.
How did I get here?
Like so many people, I got furloughed at the start of April due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
During furlough there were 0 alerts in Slack for outages. If you don’t test, the numbers look great, right…
On my first day back, I headed into CloudWatch to look for some VPC flow logs, only to see an angry looking red ALARM staring at me from CloudWatch.
“Hmm” I thought, “I didn’t get any alerts, wtf.”
So off to Chatbot I go. The first thing I do is try to edit the Chatbot workspace, and was promptly…
