Unveiling Multibot, the “glue” for enterprise workflows

How are you delivering Slack incident management workflows that serve the many teams across your enterprise? How are you addressing the differences in their use cases, access needs, isolation needs, and tech stacks, all while enabling everyone to collaborate? These are challenging questions to answer. To effectively do so, you have a host of conditions to support at the team and company-wide levels: 

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Team

• Teams need to customize their own Slack workflows 
• Admins must control who can access incident channels and run what commands

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Company-wide

• All teams must be able to work out of the same Slack workspace
• Sensitive incident type data needs to be isolated (E.g. security breaches) 
• Each organization in the company needs to bring their unique tech stacks

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In the first half of 2023, between Slack type settings and access control enhancements, we’ve addressed team workflow conditions. And now, for the second layer of workflow enablement, we’re focused on supporting these organizational conditions. To this aim, we’re proud to unveil Multibot! Multibot allows organizations, within the same Slack workspace, to divide their workforce across multiple different Blameless Slack bots with dedicated instances of Blameless. Let’s see how Multibot can be leveraged with use cases. 

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Our fictional enterprise, Global Financial Services (GFS), as a leading FinTech Enterprise with a global footprint, multiple subsidiaries and portfolios of different services (teams), knows the challenges of supporting diverse workflow conditions well. Let’s look at how they are using multibot to meet these conditions and enable all of their enterprise’s workflows. 

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Security Incidents and Teams

Between data breach responses and sensitive investigations, the information security teams must use to resolve incidents is often highly sensitive and could be used in devastating ways by malicious actors. Any role-based access control (RBAC) system alone isn’t enough for GFS’s executives to feel assured that they won’t have security incident data exposed to non-privileged users. By creating a dedicated instance for their security team, along with its own defined RBAC controls, and connecting this instance to a dedicated bot, they completely isolate their data. Any attempts to interface with their security bot by unauthorized users will fail including any accidental adding of users to threads. Importantly, these security teams are still a part of the other instances of Blameless and interact with their engineering peers in the same Slack Workspace.

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Different Organizations, Different Tools

GFS acquired an innovative cash lending service Lend, this year. Now that the merger is almost complete, the team is officially becoming a subsidiary of GFS and is getting started with transitioning its incident workflows to the corporate GFS Slack Hub. Along with needing to interact with the rest of the members of GFS, Lend needs to maintain its integration with the existing enterprise reliability management tech stack its teams rely on. Its monitoring, alerting, ticketing, and video conferencing tools are already configured and depended upon by hundreds of users across the company, so losing connection would be highly disruptive. To make the transition seamless, Lend creates their own dedicated instance of Blameless and connects to their own Blameless Bot. This way they can bring their existing tech stack and integrate it with their own instance, while remaining in the GFS workspace to collaborate with the broader enterprise.  

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How it works:

1. Each bot (3) maps to a single, isolated instance of Blameless 
2. Slack command control is based on the RBAC of the instance mapped to that bot
3. Interaction via Slack commands with each bot being triggered by a distinct bot name 

           a. /Blameless (original)

            b. /Blresponse (new) 

            c. /Blsecurity (new) 

        4. Multiple bots can occupy a single Slack Channel at a time, but not a single incident thread. 

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Get Started

Create a new instance and select a bot to pair it with, or reach out to a member of Blameless for a demo to get started. 

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(Remember, each bot connects to one instance. If you pair an in-use bot with a new instance, it will disconnect the old instance from Slack and you will have to reauthenticate it.)

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