Organizations have transformed with a globally distributed workforce to create better collaboration, which is key to success. More organizations are adopting hybrid cloud and SD-WAN solutions to help with this journey. But many organizations using legacy SD-WAN solutions lack visibility into their SD-WAN environments, as these solutions are missing the right level and ease of visibility. To manage that, IT staff are required to log on to corporate network and use extensive queries on SD-WAN analytics which leads to inefficient troubleshooting of network and application performance issues, and limits collaboration among employees.
Improved Collaboration with Next-Gen SD-WAN Chatbot and Slack
ChatOps are gaining popularity to enable self-service and collaboration in the hybrid world. Chatbots provides real-time communication, multi-user access from web and mobile devices and easy access to previous commands. I am extremely excited to announce that we are introducing the Prisma SD-WAN Chatbot for Slack CloudBlade, enabling organizations to leverage Slack for easy information access and collaboration. Additional features include:
- Administrators and users can query the Chatbot to get network and application performance information using natural language queries.
- All of this can be done without logging into a console.
- Send instant notifications on the Slack channel for alerts and alarms without the need for users to log on to corporate networks or the SD-WAN dashboards.
Customers can better run their operations when the tools used by various teams for communication are natively enabled for network visibility and control. This capability allows IT and non-IT staff to collaborate better and reduce troubleshooting cycles to improve network availability and user experience.
Steve Hamrick, VP, of Product Management at Slack believes this integration will improve incident response, claiming:
“Rapid response to network operations issues is more important now than ever. The Prisma SD-WAN Chatbot for Slack will be a crucial way for network operations teams to stay on top of the health and operational status of their SD-WAN, and will allow IT administrators to organize and execute an incident response program in Slack faster and easier than ever before.”
Automate Operations with Prisma SD-WAN Chatbot CloudBlade
Prisma SD-WAN simplifies and fully automates integration with 3rd parties, using its unique API-based CloudBlade platform without any service disruption.
Customers can take advantage of this Chatbot CloudBlade to achieve multiple benefits, including:
- Access SD-WAN information on preferred medium. IT administrators can instantly access information about their SD-WAN environment by enabling Prisma SD-WAN Chatbot experience on Slack, gaining visibility into site health, app performance score, bandwidth consumption, and circuit failures. Moving away from the legacy approach that mandates corporate access and supported devices to access metrics, this integration delivers visibility securely anywhere, anytime, and on any smart device.
- Conversational communication leveraging Natural language processing. Prisma SD-WAN ChatOps allows easy information access using natural language queries. Broader teams besides IT administrators, such as desktop support and executive users can easily look up network health, application performance, and analytics data and collaborate better on any issues. Customers can use commands such as “How healthy is my site?”
- Deliver the best user experience. Prisma SD-WAN Chatbot give users access to important information directly from the chat window, drastically reducing context switching. Critical issues are already identified through Chatbot allowing IT administrators to quickly troubleshoot and resolve them, resulting in reduced downtime and improved application performance. Users can get information about sites, apps, and branch appliances using Chatbot.
- Receive instant event notifications. Prisma SD-WAN Chatbot sends notifications of events on a Slack channel as they occur, enabling timely resolution of network incidents and maintaining uptime SLAs.
To learn more about how Prisma SD-WAN and Slack enable collaboration, check out our integration guide.