On-Call Bot Serverless

This is a Typescript slack bot which allows posting schedule data to a Slack channel. It uses AWS Lambda and the serverless framework.

The baseline data source is a Google Spreadsheet. This uses slack bolt and node google spreadsheet API.

Setup

The bot requires several environment variables to run.

Name	Description
SLACK_SIGNING_SECRET	Information for the app to interact with Slack
SLACK_BOT_TOKEN	Also used for Slack API
GOOGLE_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_EMAIL	Email for the service account, which has been granted access to the Google Spreadsheet
GOOGLE_PRIVATE_KEY	Creds for access.
SLACK_GOOGLE_SHEET_ID	ID of the google sheet so Slack can access it

An admin must install the Bot in the Slack workspace in order to use Slack slash commands.

Slack Usage - Slash Commands

/oncall help to see slash command help

/oncall now to see who is on call right now.

/oncall schedule to see the next few weeks of schedule

/oncall post schedule to post the next few weeks of schedule and @ listed users

/oncall refresh to refresh data from the spreadsheet

The message :arrow_right: *On-call Reminder* :arrow_left: will trigger a schedule now + post schedule

/oncall - same as /oncall schedule

Data Format - Spreadsheet

The baseline data lives in a Google Spreadsheet. The library used to access this sheet treats the first row as column names, so format must be preserved.

Schedule

This sheet is the main schedule.

• Date Start
• Date End
• Final Primary
• Final Secondary

Names in the Final Primary and Final Secondary columns are primary keys which map to Team Data.

Team Data

This sheet maps users' first and lastname to Slack Member IDs.

• Display Name
• Slack Member ID

Slack Data

List of Slack workspace channels and IDs, which will be custom to each workspace.

• channel
• id

Slack Messages

Flat list of messages to display.

• Message

Substitutions are enabled for the start and end of on-call period.

• ${period_start}
• ${period_end}

Flat Data

This is a simple list of key-value pairs, with cells in the first row (column names) as the keys, and the next row containing all respective data.

• resources - added to messaging when on-call schedule is posted

Deployment

SLS makes this easy to deploy to AWS.

sls deploy --stage prod --aws-profile profile-name